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 Contd
• 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 users 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)