WNAG: Advisory Report Presented to: UCIST by: Stephen Sempson

Nexus Changes Engineering –Bruce Campbell has left Engineering Computing to become the Manager of Science Computing IST –Ray White is now officially with Engineering Computing –this is an IST position shuffle

Nexus Icon/Logo the branding effect is good need to move on to a new icon the icon has to work in 3 formats this makes it quite challenging to design

Nexus Icon/Logo large icon - which can be more elaborate, suitable for splash screens, manual covers, etc. small icon - 32 x 32 pixels x 16 colours, for desktop icons tiny icon - 16 x 16 pixels x 16 colours, for upper left hand corner icon of apps

Nexus Icon/Logo suggestion for a logo that should fit all the requirements go back to the definition of nexus –a means of connection; a link or tie –a connected series or group –the core or centre

Nexus Icon/Logo a new icon/logo has been selected based on an earlier attempt to solicit suggestions/designs a review of all input, with the final design can be found at iew/Nexus/NewIcon

Nexus Icon/Logo this icon has been voted/recommended to be the new icon/logo for use

Nexus Office Computers more than 50% (conservative) of all faculty- based machines are still unmanaged there maybe thousands of computers which may move to managed systems Nexus is frequently and inaccurately thought of only the student network

Nexus Office Computers to move towards a managed workstation –Faculty has control in the managed system –users can keep control over their system –have different levels of managed control over the workstation

Nexus Office Computers basically 4 different models: –the very secure and locked down student lab workstation –the fully managed office workstation –the security managed office workstation –the portable devices

Nexus Office Computers all 4 models have the following managed services in common: –Antivirus –Windows Updates –very strict firewall using Internet Protocol Security (IPSec). this allows protection to users, within their environment, where office users can be local administrators who can administer their machine

Nexus Schema Change small nexus schema change added the field: nexusWksAdministrator this is being used to deal with distributed management

Nexus Schema Change moving forward in our plan to implement the new security model, there are two big steps that need to be accomplished –all Group Policies (GPOs) to be moved to the ownership of the people who should own them –all workstations permissions to the people selected by department to have write access both of these are now possible and are being implemented

WINS Flaw Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) –provides a distributed database for registering and querying dynamic computer name-to-IP address mapping in a routed network environment a flaw in Windows server software could allow remote attacks to launched against systems disabled the WINS server for NEXUS domain

Nexus Break-in there was a break-in into nexus over the Christmas holidays various special utilities notification prevented the attacker from going further the attacker had prior knowledge of two administrator passwords this person had done significant legwork in advance, much of it in December

Nexus Slow Logins created a feature whereby the user can elect at login time whether to load the profile or not if the user enters a dash before the userid (e.g. - erick2) then we revert to a local profile on the workstation. for the duration of the session, the user has his usual N: drive, but the profile used is what would be given if the user was logging in for the first time

Nexus Slow Logins this local profile option should give approximately constant login delays (because less network i/o is required). the exact time will depend on the locally installed software, because each application will add its part to the profile

Nexus Slow Logins when the user logs off, this temporary profile is not copied back to the network. it still sits on the hard disk, and is eventually erased. the user's personal profile is untouched

Nexus Slow Logins the end result a university-wide solution to this problem this difficult issue was solved in a very short time, and in a very professional manner

Nexus moving to XP time to phase out Windows 2000