As part of a project that will be on-going through the summer, CBC Computer Support will move all user and computer accounts from the Chemistry Active Directory to the ASC AD.  This is a large project, and will cause some inconvenience for our customers.  We have the following motivations for performing this move:

• The move is the best way to satisfy OSU computer security requirements for identity management.
• The move will allow CBC to take full advantage of resources provided by the ASC Technology Services Group.  First and foremost is a much better backup system with more depth and security than anything we can afford as a department.
• The move will allow users in CBC to have single sign-on, based on their OSU name.n identities.
• The move will allow us to clean up some lingering problems we have with our current Chemistry Active Directory domain services.*  For example, after the move we will no longer use roaming profiles on Windows systems.

There will be several phases to this project.  Our goal is for most of the work to be transparent to the end user, with only one interruption per research or staff support group.  We will perform the actual user and computer account moves during the last three weeks of July, to give us enough time to work out any post-move problems well before fall semester starts.

*Detail:  The Chemistry domain has existed for almost twenty years.  Due to the domain’s age, and to numerous and sometimes inconsistent policy changes by different administrators over the years, there are systemic problems with group policy, profile management, and other underlying domain mechanisms.  One solution for these problems, (albeit not the only one), is to move to a new domain.

We will have a brief network and partial systems outage at about 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 17th.  During this outage,

• The connection between the CBC network and the rest of campus will be down.
• The internal CBC network will remain up.  However, we will take the opportunity to apply critical security patches and restart the Windows file server winfs.  Therefore, it’s a good idea to close all files open on Windows network shares and log off before 5:00 p.m.
• Access to email will be interrupted, if the system you are using is connected by LAN cable to the network.
• OSU Wireless will not be affected in any way during this outage.

I apologize for the service interruption on a weekday evening, because I know that this will inconvenience users.  However, I wanted to make sure that we had complete access to support from OCIO during the down time.  It seems like a reasonable compromise to do this on a weekday evening over break week.