NT Services for UNIX - first impressions Burkhard Renk, Uni Mainz
University of Mainz - IS n Approximate Students n Big computer users are: u Economics and laws u Human science u Natural Science F Physics F Geography F Chemistry
General IS organisation n Computer center u HP/Convex Parallel computer u Digital UNIX Server ( 2 x 8400 ) u NT - Server ( Cluster ) u NT Workstation pools ( some 250 ) u UNIX - NT integration with DCE/DFS u Services migrating from DFS(UNIX) to DFS(NT) u Setting up multi user NT ( WTS, Wincenter )
Independent IS in Institutes n Economics, laws, human science: u Migration from (MVS,AS400,BS2000,SINIX,…) to NT Servers completed. u NT clients, W95 clients, MAC clients, few UNIX n Natural science u Move to commercial apps in most fields ( x86 NT ) u Physics: ( coming from VMS ) F Solid State, Atomic, Nuclear:NT migration done F Theoryalmost pure LINUX F Particle Physics bound by CERN - compatibility n A general infrastructure has to primarily support NT
University IS Orders in 1998 n 665 PCs with NT license n 81 Macintosh n 39 UNIX Systems (incl. 5 Linux Alphas)
Consequences n Optimization of services for NT clients n Treat UNIX as special client. Available was for download: Microsoft UNIX Services for NT Beta 2 So we downloaded and tried it.
Installation n Hardware: DEC PW433a with WTS n Self-extracting and running setup ok n First reboot n Some fields in a configuration shield for NFS had to be filled out. u As a former VMS and now NT manger, I did not know what they wanted u My UNIX guru didn’t understand either u We made a best try n Next reboot - Click on NFS network
Next Steps n Click and wonder what the UNIX people export n Set up an export yourself n Set up a user mapping u Simple interface n Tool to see the exports of NFS servers n Tool to see RPC configuration of servers
User mapping
Show Mount
Very first tests n NFS server can be used with UNIX clients, measured speed 800K for real file copy disk to disk over 10Mb Ethernet. (PW433a as NT Server and DUNIX4.0d client ) n DUNIX 3.x systems did not understand user mapping? n Strange things when accessing objects twice? n Did not yet really understand mapping of rights. ( Need for much better documentation ) n Speed between 2 NT systems over NFS similar to Netbios over TCP/IP ( 3 MB/s disk to disk over 100 Mb Ethernet ) n Password synchronization not tested n Telnet server not tested
Conclusion n It is a Beta version n It is working and performance looks promising n Better documentation needed n Is worth to be looked at carefully when released.