WNAG: Advisory Report

1. WNAG: Advisory Report Presented to: UCIST By: Stephen Nickerson February 3, 2006

2. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group (WNAG) consists of members from: • Applied Health Sciences (AHS) • Arts • Engineering • Environmental Studies (ES) • Information Systems and Technology (IST) • Math • Science

3. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • The Nexus Active Directory Environment consists of: • industry standard implementations and practices • some customized configuration • some tools developed in-house

4. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Nexus supports distributed administration • There are four domain administrator accounts • Two in the Faculty of Engineering • The other two are distributed among the other faculties • This provides opportunity for all to participate at the domain administrator level

5. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Distributed Administration – Cont’d • Faculties/Departments all have Organizational Unit (OU) level Administration • Each Faculty/Department has full administrative control over their OU

6. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Nexus was created as a secure environment • Nexus continues to expand both as a teaching environment and in office and research environments • Nexus has adapted to support Macintosh and Linux authentication

7. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • There are approximately 3425 Nexus servers and workstations (31 Jan. 2006) • 7 Servers • 3418 Workstations • AHS 361 • Arts 447 • Engineering 1722 • ES 247 • IST 91 • Math 246 • Science 304

8. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Active Directory (AD) was designed for top-down administration • The Nexus AD was designed for multi-tiered administration • Customization of the Nexus AD enables distributed administration at the faculty/department OU level

9. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Six Domain Controllers (DCs) are distributed across campus • Provides redundancy and increases the robustness of the environment

10. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Each ‘home’ faculty provides disk space for their student accounts • additional disk space may be required by a student taking a course, and provided by the ‘teaching’ faculty

11. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • The WNAG mailing list provides a forum for questions, suggestions and comments • Direct access to peers • Feedback is prompt • Issues are addressed quickly

12. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • documentation subcommittee goals • Improve existing documentation • Create additional documentation • Assist new administrators • Use Nexus TWiki • Allows for collaboration on documentation

13. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Nexus was designed: • to present users and administrators with a flexible, secure environment • for ease of management through automation • e.g. accounts are automatically created based on Registrar data

14. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Nexus determines faculty- and user-specific values at login • these values are used by user-applications • Examples: • Setting appropriate servers for e-mail clients • Faculty and department variables for other uses

15. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Started the convention of placing lab machines under an OU called “public access” • Helps with data mining • Compare and contrast what goes on in public labs and office machines • Makes it easier to determine how many public and private machines are in the Nexus environment

16. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Nexus provides synchronization of UNIX and Nexus passwords • Added support for –userid • Allows for logging in without the user’s roaming profile • Professors/Instructors have found this beneficial when using podium machines

17. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • NIPFW (firewall for student labs) • Based on the sourceforge project WIPFW • This is a MS Windows port of the FreeBSD package IPFW1 • Provides logging • Automatically gathers statistics • Has a command line interface • A very robust firewall • Rule definition format is comprehensive and well defined • Currently being tested in Arts and Science

18. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Software packaging • Engineering Computing packages the common applications software - used by many faculties/departments • Each faculty/department package software for their specific needs, as required.

19. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • The logon browser is Nexus specific • A concept brought forward from Polaris • New look logon page - Spring 2005 • closer to the UW “Common Look and Feel” • customizable image and text areas • The customizations can be done in an OU specific manner • Setting URLs in the AD entry • Allows faculties/departments to display important messages for their users

20. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group

21. Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group • Looking to the future • Nexus will continue to evolve with Active Directory and other technologies • Continued growth • Main Campus • Student labs (e.g. Science is planning a new lab) • Office and research environments • Beyond the Main Campus • School of Architecture (Cambridge) • School of Pharmacy (Kitchener)