Seeking global authorization system (Summary)

From: Bob Jones (bj@oregon.uoregon.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 20 1992 - 10:41:00 CST


Weeks ago I wrote:
>We here at the University of Oregon are interested in setting up (and
>maintaining ;-) a (secure!) global authorization database that would serve a
>heterogeneous environment of Suns running SunOS, VAXes running VMS, and Novell
>servers. There are some common entities in the authorization for each of the
>aforementioned systems (e.g., group-id, user-id, username) that we would like
>to keep synchronized across our computing environment. We hope that this will
>facilitate remote access via such commands as rcopy and rlogin while at the
>same time minimize the number of times users' passwords need to travel around
>the network. Does anyone know of any products that already exist to do this?
>I'd appreciate any tips or other info. Please e-mail responses to me - if
>there is sufficient interest I will summarize to the net. Thanks much.
Here, finally, is a summary of what information I did receive:

hal@world.std.com (Harry A Levinson) pointed me at Project Athena at MIT.
postmaster@athena.mit.edu (Ron Hoffman) suggested poking around
athena-dist.mit.edu via anonymous ftp for the Athena Technical Plan documents.
He also recommends subscribing to the Kerberos discussion mailing list at
kerberos@athena.mit.edu.

kwthomas@nsslsun.nssl.uoknor.edu (Kevin W. Thomas) suggested looking into
MULTINET for VMS, which uses a Unix /etc/passwd file to map VMS users to UNIX
users but doesn't cover our Novell NetWare concerns.

russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz would like to add an Sgi 4d running Irix to our
hypothetical heterogeneous environment. NIS is an option (not necessarily the
best) among most Unix systems. He, too, suggested something like Kerberos.

The consensus around here seems to be that MIT's Project Athena holds the most
promise for us. If anyone else has any ideas regarding this subject, I'd still
be delighted to hear about them. Once again, e-mail would be best. Thanks.

--
Bob Jones     "33"
Computing Center, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR  97403  (503)346-1731
INTERNET:  bj@oregon.uoregon.edu     BITNET:  bj@oregon



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