Allan Marcus, Technical Staff Member, Los Alamos National Laboratory
John McDermon, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Track: System Administration
Date: Thursday, October 28
Time: 10:45am - 11:30am
Location: Winchester
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A modern enterprise computing environment needs to provide common services for the users, including central authentication, file services, directory services (group management), e-mail, DNS, printing, software updates, and security. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) our scientists use Mac OS X, Windows, and various other flavors of UNIX (primarily Linux and Solaris) on their desktops to accomplish their mission. In addition to desktops, our scientists use supercomputers for science, visualization, and national security purposes. The computing environment, therefore, needs to be reliable, flexible, and secure.
In order to provide this computing environment, LANL's Computing, Communications, and Networks division has developed an enterprise computing environment that allows Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and various supercomputer platforms to not only coexist, but to take advantage of many common services. Integrating these many operating systems into a common environment is not always easy, but it can be done.
This talk will focus on how we integrated Mac OS X into LANL's enterprise computing environment. We will discuss integration issues with NIS, LDAP, CUPS, Active Directory (and why we didn't use it), Kerberos and enterprise KDCs, Open Directory, remote home folders, diskless booting, and both client desktop and cluster node management with Panther Server.
Apple provides for integration with many of these tools, and in typical Apple fashion, sometimes it's as simple as filling out a configuration dialog box. In other instances the editing of arcane and mysterious XML files is required. And finally, sometimes Apple's proprietary flavor of UNIX limits integration possibilities. We'll talk about the resources available for system administrators to get help and we will explore all of these aspects of integrating Mac OS X into a heterogeneous enterprise computing environment.
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