[lug] FW: [co-sage] Notes from the Jan Meeting

[Andrew Diederich]

I thought you all might like to see the notes from the last Colorado SAGE
(System Administrators Guild) meeting.  Enjoy.

-Andrew 
andrew at netdelivery.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Barbara Dijker [mailto:barb at netrack.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2000 14:53
To: co-sage at netrack.net
Subject: [co-sage] Notes from the Jan Meeting



The January meeting was held at SUN Microsystems in Broomfield between
6-8pm. 20 people attended. It was discussed and agreed among those in
attendance that 6-8pm Wed is a reasonable time/day to have these meetings.
A short discussion was started about what name to call the group. Some
ideas were tossed out before someone suggested that this would be better
served as an discussion via the email list. 

What did and did not happen surrounding Y2K was discussed. Relative to the
computer industry, these items were noted: 

- Some old email systems were displaying the year was 19100 

- Oracle came out with a patch in December for backups that were failing on

dates past December 31, 1999.  

- When VeriSign on Navigator 4.0.7 is used, authentication is not
happening. 
 
In general, nobody had any Y2K horror stories to relate. We discussed
various Y2K issues that came up around the world. 

A large part of the meeting was spent discussing Windows 2000 and its
dynamic DNS feature. Eric Galyon (CSU) and Jason Miller (Access Health),
shared their experiences with Windows 2000 via classes and/or a test
environments. Most of the discussion with DNS centered around  the issues
of implementing this feature within a mixed (UNIX and NT) operating
environment. Apparently, Microsoft is recommending that Windows NT 2000 do
all DNS functions in a mixed environment. A good suggestion was to make the

Windows NT 2000 machines a sub-domain and have it manage only the DNS for
the NT machines in that sub-domain. One difference noted about Windows NT
2000 DNS is that information is updated on a transaction basis instead of
the traditional zone transfer concept. Eric noted that Windows NT 2000
wants to manage the reverse zones (PTR records) too - which causes problems

with forward/reverse mismatch if you don't let Windows manage both forward
and reverse zones especially in a DHCP environment. No one was certain if
Windows NT 2000 DNS can now correctly handle a sub-delegation of a "class
C" zone. After about 30-40 minutes, the discussion on this topic concluded
that it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

As for other areas of Windows 2000, it was agreed that the user will not
see too much difference with Windows NT 2000, and that it is mainly a major

change from an administrative standpoint. For the user, these are the
highlights: 

true plug-and-play  
seems to combine the best of '98 and NT  
cursor is highlighted  
boots into safe and command line mode  
performs better on the appropriate hardware  
requires more RAM and disk  
supports USB ports and DVD 

Windows NT 2000 has numerous inclusions along with changes to groups, types

of groups, group policies, ACLs (access control lists), administrative
features, etc.	The forest/tree concept of enterprise administration was
briefly discussed. It was said that there is much granular access control
available but that "enterprise" authority was absolute and unlimited. That
creates problems in environments where you don't want your central
administrators to have authority to change your local area settings.

Barb asked for discussion topics at future meetings. Here is what was
suggested: 

Solaris 8  
central vs distributed model; thin client; comeback of Xterms  
BIND9  
VPN technology 
sendmail replacements 
news servers 
backup strategies 
clustering software 
favorite tools used by system administrators 
license managers 

Meeting notes submitted by Hope Bloom.


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