[56] in winnt
notes from 10/14/97 meeting on NT Server Training Curriculum
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rob Smyser)
Tue Oct 21 12:53:33 1997
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 12:25:41 -0400
To: winnt@MIT.EDU
From: Rob Smyser <smyser@MIT.EDU>
Many thanks to those who attended for the very productive meeting on
Training.
These are my notes from what happened...
Background:
IT Partners have been vocal in requesting administrator-level classroom
training in NT. IS does not now have such a class to offer. Office
Practice is willing to fund a class in W89 for it-partners. Consensus
emerged in hallway talks that Glow Technology
(http://www.ultranet.com/~gtc/) has the right style and content for MIT.
Glow has a three day class on Administering NT and is willing to work with
IS folks to shorten it to a length the partners might accept (two days) and
customize the content some to be more appropriate to MIT needs. Kirsten of
Glow faxed the current course outline and asked if the Winnt@Mit group
would look it over for what to use and what to delete. Her own initial
pass was to drop day 3, if it was necessary to make it two days.
At the Meeting:
The WinNT group started considering the question of what exactly would
we want in a class or classes for the MIT IT-Partner community? And what
are the other issues we need to be thinking about in training for NT?
These are my note from the white board.
IS ought to have its own classes on administering NT in the MIT Way.
- developing such a class should be on Training's plate,
using their usual techniques.
- our offerings could be grouped into modules, offered
singly or in an afternoon or all-day workshop focussing
on NT for certain MIT audiences (see below)
1 hour formats -- a single important topic
3 hours -- five topics, say, from the list below.
7 hours -- ten topics, say, trying to cover\ all of the
MIT specific aspects of NT admin.
The Audience comes in two flavors --
- unix sysadmins who need to also do an NT server.
These folks know sysadmin issues well, but not in NT.
Topics would include the ways to do familiar tasks:
adduser
ipconfig
scripting and shells
printer sharing
users and groups
backups
sharing files between NT and Unix
ways to meld NT and Unix policies to avoid trouble
- win95 or win311 users new to NT and also new to server
administration of any kind. These folks may be given a
server to manage within their office or workgroup.
Topics for this audience might include:
"It's easy to screw things up; watch out for A, B, C"
secure computing practice
installing software well
whether to run a domain controller or not
We'd like to see these module covered in classes from outside or developed
from inside:
(basic NT admin level)
- installation
- ip setup
- users & groups & permissions
- installing software (as administrator or not, e.g.,)
- printer setup and sharing
- monitoring events and troubleshooting
- "don't do" and "do" recommendations
(workgroup administrator level)
- domains and workgroups
- policies
- non-WINS server solutions for across-subnets sharing
- integrating or not with Netware and Netbeui environments
Some modules often found in commercial NT classes are not relevant at MIT:
- Fault-Tolerance, Clustering, etc.
- Firewalls and similar security measures
- Trust relationships between domains
- Microsoft Backup and other non-ADSM backup strategies
Tune the training to the MIT outlook:
- show the GUI tool for admin functions and also show
the command-line equivalent. (for the unix sysadmins)
- printing should exploit the tcpip printing via
Athena lpd servers.
Some training questions are really Policy statements by IS:
- what to do with the administrator account
(rename it, change the password, never use it)
- should the end-user have the admin password?
should the main end-user be in the Administrator group?
- should IS have key-escrow access to the admin password?
(to help fix systems after they've crashed and the end
user doesn't have the password)
- what is the preferred IS way to share printers?
We need Training to take on course preparation, with input from the
Technical side. We can use professional prepared courses to meet the
immediate need for training it-partners, and to serve as models or points
of departure for IS-crafted classes. To that end, we'll pursue the Glow
Training classes, substituting their three day class with a two-day
version. Office Practice will arrange to offer this class to it-partner
community at no charge as a benefit of partner membership and to increase
the installed base of NT expertise across campus.
- - - - - - - -
Action Item:
Carol Elder offered to take on the scheduling and content of classes to
be help by Glow at the W89 site in November. By now you've seen other
email in which she reports having arranged it for dates in November and
again in December.
