[122] in Kakapo Windows Team
laptop abstract
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Thu Oct 2 10:32:03 2003
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 10:32:02 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200310021432.h92EW2w3014260@the-rim.mit.edu>
From: "Thomas L. Thornton" <tomt@MIT.EDU>
To: kakapo@MIT.EDU
[Although I have a long Laptop writeup, it needs more developer team
comments. So, for a start I would like kakapo comments on the
following abstract. -Tom]
Using a Windows Domain member laptop on MITnet is in most ways very
similar to using a non-Domain laptop. From a user's perspective, what
distinguishes a laptop member of any Windows 2000 Domain from a
standalone machine is its use of the network to authenticate and
access domain resources. There, both the computer System account and
an interactive user account must access resources over the network.
Less visible to the Domain machine user are the System account refresh
of domain Group Policies and automatic software deployment that occur,
usually at bootup.
A laptop issue more specific to the win.mit.edu Domain, or WIN, is the
use of Roaming Profiles stored by default in AFS, although there are
alternative per-user profile location settings, such as a local
profile. WIN provides easy access to many other settings by machine
container administrators, like limiting automatic software deployment
or caching roaming profiles to the local disk. A recent addition to
the WIN feature set allows duplicating the contents of shared
resources formerly only at \\win.mit.edu\dfs\ops\distrib. Now these
also can appear on a local mirror, avoiding network dependencies by
many scripts and commmon utilities.
Many more details of Windows laptops in Domains, on MITnet and
elsewhere, soon will be posted to:
http://mit.edu/pismere/presentations/laptop.txt
In summary, laptops are supported within WIN on MITnet in a variety of
configurations. If your department lab or center considers WIN, to
gain optimum performance it may be beneficial to discuss your laptop
needs in person with a member of pismere-ops.
