As many of you have noticed, UVM has a diverse computing environment. An estimated 90% of all desktop computers on campus are of the MS Windows persuasion; but Windows is hardly one product. Currently Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT Workstation, and 2000 Professional systems can be found throughout the campus. The subtleties in unifying these platforms on a simile network is a large challenge. And that still leaves 10% of faculty and staff using Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, and various other operating systems. Behind the scenes, CIT runs a variety of AIX, Solaris, Linux, VM, and NetWare servers to provide centralized communications, scheduling, applications, and file storage services. What a mess! How could any department hope to unify all of these fundamentally different systems?
Traditionally, host integration solutions have been very expensive. Often, it is less expensive to replace your entire infrastructure with a unified solution. A number of developing open-source technologies offer some hope of overcoming a number of obstacles to cross-platform host integration without breaking the bank.
Among these solutions are Meta Directories, OpenLDAP, Kerberos 5, U/Win an CygWin, GNOME, KDE, OpenSSH and SSH2, Samba, Netatalk, CODA, AFS, PAM, NI_PAM, OpenOffice/StarOffice, and the GNU XWin32 project. In the paragraphs below I will attempt to provide some background on these projects. We will explore (briefly) the aims of the projects, their current status, and links to information and download sites.
