From ScotLUG

Linux and OSS in Informatics

by Simon Wilkinson and Stephen Quinney

1930, Thursday October 4th 2007

at the Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue

Summary:

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh has similar IT infrastructure requirements to any medium-sized company of 3500 users, plus additional demands related to research and teaching goals. The 1500 machines run an entirely Open Source-based infrastructure on predominantly Linux client and servers.

Key components are:

• Kerberos for authentication
• LDAP for authorisation and directory services
• LCFG for configuration management
• OpenAFS for network file system

This talk covered the business motivations for choosing these components, how an organisation can use only freely-available components, and the challenges we have faced in deploying this system. We took a general look at the solutions and issues involved, and how other sites can learn from our experiences.

Presentation slides available for download from:

• here
• or here
• or /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/user/s/sxw/Talks/EdLug-2007-10/

This presentation represents the views of the speakers, not their employer.

47 attendees on the night.