Unity Migration Blog

I met with Dennis this morning to give him an overview of Microsys staff, functions and challenges. You can a short summary here:

Microsys Overview

He was receptive. He sees his role as a communications facilitator between Sam and staff. He is interested in representing what we do back to Sam. He expressed sympathy for the amount of effort required in a migration when systems must run in parallel.

Dennis would like a slightly more technical overview, of how the pieces like authenticaion, printing, application distribution down to the desktop fit in together. I told him I would schedule something with the group after I get back.

In case you find it helpful, I have extracted the sections of John's printing reviewer's guide pages and compiled them into a template. I added general questions that might be answerered for each section.

Please add to this page if you can think of other details that will be helpful to others working on the guides. I intend to keep it under "Drafts" so that it is WRAP protected. Here's the URL:

http://microsys.unity.ncsu.edu/documentation/drafts/Reviewers-Guide-Template.php

Microsys folks,

I've created a new category on the blog "Reports and Updates."

If you could include this category as you post your AD pilot activities, it will allow the reminder script (still being worked on) to detect when you've posted your updates, and not hassle you further about them.

The ITD Novell servers received an update to eDir 8.7.3.9 over the weekend. It was installed to root replicas of NDS11RS and NDS10RS on Friday night. The remainder of the servers received the update on Saturday evening.

Here is the revised agenda template for the Friday planning meetings.

Agenda Template

Progress Reports
Reminder: Post progress reports by Thursday on blog or in email to Microsys

Outstanding Issues
Barriers to completing things

Q & A
Questions and answers about specific items

Brainstorming & Discussion
Discussion about specific items, goals or direction, brainstorming on ideas/solutions
Topics should be identified in advance by posting before the end of Thursday

Dog + Pony
Presentations planned for the current meeting. The topic should have been posted the previous Monday and feedback should have been given by the previous Wednesday staff meeting.

Future Dog + Pony Planning
Identify desirable presentations, schedule them

Review:

• Decisions
  Ensure everyone is on the same page about decisions made during the meeting
• Deliverables
  Assign deliverables and/or ensure everyone is on the same page about what will be done
• Goals
  Identify and review larger goals/principles

Prioritize work
Identify dependencies and organize work by importance/urgency

Agenda for next week
Identify agenda items for the next week

One of the links off of the Microsys home page , "Group Policy Sync Status" has been improved.

This page, which anyone can view, is primarily intended for us to "watch" the state of Group Policy syncronization in our domain. Every 10 minutes, a script compares the version of the GPOs in the filesystem (they are stored on the SYSVOL of domain controllers) to the version stamp stored in the active directory. Should there be a version mismatch, it should be caught, here.

In addition, the name of each GPO is also a link to a detail page describing the settings that GPO delivers. In the past, this was restricted to Microsys staff members only. Thanks to our Remedy Autogroups, we can now assign rights to the All_Remedy AD group and allow any help desk professional identified as a Remedy user access.

Now, anyone in a Remedy work group will gain access to these pages, and lose that access when their Remedy credentials become invalid for any reason.

At the last microsys staff meeting we talked about how hard it was to get documentation up, and keep it current, and how so many of our development efforts were coming suspiciously close to reinventing a wiki :-)

We talked about looking for a wiki that "sucked less" that might actually help us make and update content, and not just have to learn new markup. I haven't started on that, yet.

What I have found is a GPL'd content management system called Drupal that seems to have a lot of the features we thought were important. These would be:

• Trivial integration with Active Directory or Kerberos (or WRAP) authentication.
• Some sort of authorization scheme to allow for several publishing roles. In a perfect
  world, one that could use AD
• As standardized and/or varied markup as possible

Well, drupal seems to have all that. It has really strong blogging and forum support, and one can have comment pages on most any content, which is pretty cool, and it has a concept of creating shared "books" from a variety of sources and authors. Plus, it has all sorts of blogger apis for external content creation methods, and you can enter (x)html in the text entry boxes and it just works.

It seems like it has the key advantages of wiki (comments, revisions, distributed content creation, only a web browser required) without the disadvantage of special markup.

I think this would be an easy deploy, since they mention how to integrate it with AD in their docs. I'm not sure how hard it will be to get all the features up and going, as it's got quite an array of plug-ins and setup options.

It is SQL based, so it may be a pain to access from Contribute.

Anybody care to try this one, or have another you prefer?

Folks,

In working with WebDAV, it worked out to be somewhat of a problem to have the pretty php generated index files. I've moved the fancy indexing so that it only takes effect on /documentation and /internal-documentation. Other dirs will get the standard apache indexing.

Right now, I have the permissions set so that http://microsys.unity.ncsu.edu/dfs is forbidden to all, so we don't let anything out we shouldn't. My plan is to secure this dir with "allow valid-user" so that we can provide file downloads (like the mmc plugins). I can't wait to set up some authorizations based on Remedy workgroup membership. :-)

Anyway, hopefully we'll have secure (https://) authenticated access that works with Dreamweaver up shortly.

Windows 2003 server supports two types of filesystem quotas: volume quotas and direcory quotas.

Volume quotas are exactly what you'd expect. Once quotas are enabled for a given volume, individual quota entries can be created and managed. Volume quota entries can *only* be associated with a user object. Warning thresholds can be set and logged in the event log.

Directory quotas are new in 2003 server R2. Volume quotas do not have to be enabled to use directory quotas on a given volume. Directory quotas are associated with a path and are not tied to a user or group object at all. In addition to warning levels and thresholds, there's also a "soft" quota where a limit can be set, but not enforced.

Quota-threshold-warning or over quota event can be logged, emaied to an administrator, and/or the user *who exceded the quota for the given folder*. ex, Fred gives Steve write access to his home directory. Steve copies a couple of .iso images to Fred's directory causing Fred to go over quota. Steve would get the over quota email, *not* Fred.

Directory quotas are managed through the "File Server Resource Manager" snapin (which doesn't get installed automatically on R2), or can be set/maintained programatically. I've set a 100MB quota on my own home directory and will continue to test this out. I suggest we set a much smaller quota for the "hidden" profile directory.

The migration task list is available here in Excel format:
\\unity.ad.ncsu.edu\ITD\Web\web00\documentation\ITD-Active-Directory-Environment\MigrationProjectTasks.xls

If you identify any additional tasks or want to update any of the information in the task list, please feel free to do so. It will make the planning meetings go faster.

This is also publically availble here:
http://microsys.unity.ncsu.edu/documentation/ITD-Active-Directory-Environment/Migration-Project-Tasks.php

The sortable HTML table will not be automatically updated if you make any changes to the Excel file. I will be manually updating the Excel file and regenerating the HTML on Mondays.