Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 13:40:25 -0600 (CST) From: "Daniel R. Brownstone" <drbrowns@ls.wustl.edu> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD & Windows Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980326132659.18811F-100000@ls.wustl.edu>
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This is going to be a bit long, but I hope someone out there will be able to help. I'm a student at WashU (wustl) law. Because I majored in comp sci in undergrad, I somehow ended up getting this part time job here of being the "Unix Administrator." Whatever. It basically means I've learned FreeBSD on the fly while trying to go to law school. But now it's all in danger. Here's how our systems work around here. We have 2 PC labs in the building, with a total of about 50 workstations. (They're mostly Pentium 200s.) They run Windows 95. We need windows because students use the PCs to do word processing, mostly. All of these PCs are on both our Microsoft Windows network, and the Novel Network. As far as I can tell, the only purpose for the Novel network is that the two huge HP printers in the lab are on the same network. As I said, whatever. The faculty also have Win95 on the PCs in their offices, and they do a lot more with novel. (they have GroupWise for their e-mail, etc.). Every student has an e-mail account on the FreeBSD box. Which means that to check their mail, they either dial in from home, or else they sit down at one of the PCs in our lab, and telnet in to the server from Win95. The lab PCs are not password protected, and anyone in the world can use them as long as they're sitting in front of one. Obviously, to telnet in to the FreeBSD machine, you need a login and password. It has come to pass in recent months that many of the other schools at the University have implemented restrictive policies concerning their own computer systems. The law school is the only school left on campus where someone can walk in off the street, sit down at a terminal, and work away. More importantly, they can print without restriction. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on printing paper and supplies, and while a lot of it is legit, a lot of it is also people printing out ESPN web pages. So, what the administration wants to do is to restrict printing, preferably to law students with accounts ONLY. In addition, they want to put a print quota on each student, and if a student exceeds that quota, they will have to pay. The way they want to do this is to switch all of the lab computers to Windows NT, so everyone will have to sit down and log in. Because they have absolutely no faith in the competence of any of us students, they are adamant that everyone should have only one user id and one password. Their solution: get rid of FreeBSD and find some other mail solution. They invision Student sitting down at NT, and logging in. Then he has to telnet to FreeBSD and log in again. But if he changes his FreeBSD password, his NT password won't change, and he'll get really confused because he'll never know which password to use where, and all of our PC Support resources will be used up in resetting people's passwords. The only solution, the Administration has determined, is to find a way to seamlessly integrate the password files that NT uses with the one that FreeBSD uses. Failing that, FreeBSD goes and we all switch to Win NT and/or Novel. Apparently there's somethin called NDS which is going to make everything nice and easy for us. As you can tell, I completely disagree with all of this -- but hey, I graduate in a year. In the mean time, though, I would like to come up with a solutiuon that will keep the FreeBSD box -- I think that having it as a mail and web server for the students is a great idea, everything is free, we benefit enormously, and we have great support on it.... switching to Microsoft, I think, would be a nightmare. So does anyone have ANY ideas?????? I'm desperate here. Thanks, Danny --------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel R. Brownstone drbrowns@ls.wustl.edu Wash. U. School of Law '99 ICQ #191058 *** THIS E-MAIL IS PROPRIETARY *** To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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