Of course I knew it was too good to be true. I’ve found the first fatal flaw in my plan to unify authentication on the internal network. It goes back to the Windows quotas problem I studied some time ago, and to which I’d thought I’d found a solution. I won’t go into great detail [...]
So it’s the last week during which students have access to the lab, and that means I can finally implement my plan to unify internal network user authentication. Finally! I’m so jazzed. I’ve been waiting for months (well, years, really) for the chance to do this, and it’s here at last. The general outline of [...]
One of the major hurdles in our server unification project, mentioned in Part 1 of this series, is that of redundancy. In the old paradigm, each platform’s users were hosted by a separate server. Mac users authenticated to a Mac Server, Windows users to a Windows Server, and Linux users to an NIS server. While [...]
Another solution to the problem of quotas occurred to me today: local quotas. Since the Windows workstation copies everything in the roaming profile from the server to the local machine at login, and uses that data as the user works, it actually makes a lot more sense for quotas to happen on the local workstation [...]
The ProblemSo we’ve hit a (hopefully) minor snag in our migration to a single authentication server for all platforms. It’s, of course, a problem with Windows and its roaming profiles system. Roaming profiles for Windows are like networked home accounts for Mac. The idea is simple: Your home account is stored on a networked file [...]
BackgroundAs I’ve said probably a thousand-billion times, I work in a very multi-platform environment. Our lab consists of Mac, Windows and Linux workstations, all of which rely, in some form or another, on a centralized home account server. Currently, the way this works is problematic in several ways: Each platform — Mac, Windows, Linux — [...]
So I spent much of this past weekend installing both Windows and Linux on my Dell, who I shall hereby refer to by his rightful, and possibly permanent name, satan. Many mistakes, and much learning in the process. Hooray for learning. My goal was to have one partition with the original Dell Windows system install, [...]
I’m trying to be as positive about my Windows experience as possible. It’s not easy. But as the popups and virus alerts have subsided, I’ve managed to poke around and find some really useful stuff on my Windows system. Stuff that doesn’t exist on the Mac. One of the most impressive of these is the [...]
This will be a very brief update on the progress of my Windows foray: I just want to say, I’m on the train, and I’m trying to write this, but every 10-15 minutes a popup appears from the Wireless Network Connection do-dad on my “Taskbar.” Unbenounced to me (I am not a touch typist, and [...]
Inserted my first cd in the Dell today. Musicmatch fired up. Musicmatch, in the middle of my CD listening, brought me to some message window telling me how to get to the “Now Playing” window, which I was already in. It said, “When playing CDs… Click here for Now Playing,” and it has a little [...]