COMMENTARY-- The need for security also brings with it a need to rethink processesââ,¬"especially when things slow to a crawl.
Many will identify with my annoyance at society's required levels of security. At our home we fit deadlocks and alarm systemsââ,¬"real convenient with a handful of groceriesââ,¬"that really only deter the relatively inept; if someone really wants to break in they will probably succeed. And, of course, at work we go to remarkable lengths to ensure our data is secureââ,¬"take this month's encryption review for example.
For many years now the Test Lab has had its own file server running Novell Netware X. It's not used for any of our testing but is our repository for reports, writeups, patches, drivers, you name it. Now given the Lab runs pretty -lean and mean" in terms of staff and all our server does is serve files (pretty much anyway; we certainly do not use it as an application server), our hardware requirements are pretty modest.
For many moons we got away with using an old HP server with a single 100MHz Pentium, but were forced to upgrade not long ago. Why? RMIT has standardised on Netware, we are probably one of the largest Netware sites in the country, and as a part of RMIT we need to comply with certain standardsââ,¬"fair enough really. So each time the University upgrades to a new version of Netware we need to follow suit. When the transition from 4.x to 5.x occurred we found our poor old server was not up to Novell's minimum specs so we dragged one of our Lab benchmarking servers out of test duties and it became our admin server. The unit was an NEC Express 5800ââ,¬"a pretty old unit really with a single Pentium Pro 200MHz CPUââ,¬"but upgradeable (if you could find another CPU at a reasonable price that is) to a dual processor configuration.
Alas it's crunch time againââ,¬"we have found ourselves not able to make the minimum hardware grade. You see the standard has now liftedââ,¬"we should be running Netware 6.x but our server's hardware is not up to spec and our Netware 5.0 with Directory Services 7.x (RMIT is now running Directory Services 8.x) is causing some disturbance in the Force . . . sorry, the NDS!
We could of course drag another server out of the Lab that complies, but our network administrator, like everyone else at the Lab, wants to set up a simple Red Hat server running SAMBA and VPN to handle all our admin needs. He argues, and justifiably so, that Linux will easily cope with all our requirements, on very modest hardware, and not create any angst in RMIT's LAN.
However, in the meantime, we are a bit up the proverbial creek without a paddle. The plan was to decommission the old Netware serverââ,¬"done! Then configure the new server, but with a few people away on holidays our network administrator is faced with the task of building our new server on his lonesome. We have in the interim moved all our data onto one of RMIT Training's NT servers in the city (those that have trekked out to the Lab realise we are not in the heart of Melbourne but some 20km north). We do have quite an impressive pipe between the city campus and our Bundoora campus but, of course, it's not quite as fast accessing your data as when the server is less than 10m away. But then that's a very minor whinge.
We all do a lot of work from home (this column is a prime example). Before we decommissioned our Netware server we were able to, from home, log into the server at workââ,¬"painless and with all the same drive mappings. And, over cable or ADSL it's very quick and convenient. When the network administrator took our old server down we simply thought we would just connect to the NT server in the city and still be able to work from home. That turned our to be a bit naive. Because Windows is, let's be diplomatic, a tad insecure, RMIT's firewall blocks all external accessââ,¬"security that also keeps the good guys out! So until we have our server and VPN up and running again we resort to e-mailing zipped files and folders back and forth.
All for the sake of security!
Steve Turvey is Lab Manager of the RMIT IT Test Labs, and can be reached at stevet@rmit.edu.au.
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