Active Directory/Documentation/College of Textiles Migration

Overview

The College of Textiles (COT) currently uses its own Active Directory implementation to manage the computing environment for its Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students. However, having considered the community of NCSU Colleges assembled under the WolfTech domain, the expertise of the members therein, and the willingness of the administrators to bring us on board the COT IT staff is eager to become a productive member College. To that end, this document will be used to journal our migration from the Textiles AD domain to the WolfTech domain. Hopefully the visibility provided here will assist us toward a successful migration and serve as an aid to other Colleges considering joining WolfTech.

Textiles Active Directory Architecture

The following is a description of the COT Active Directory environment from which the migration to the WolfTech AD Domain will take place.

Physical Architecture

Three domain controllers running Windows 2000 Server SP4 host AD at the COT. These servers have reached the end of their lifecycle – two are single processor Xeon 2GHz machines with 1 GB RAM and the third has 512MB RAM. Two of the servers are hosted here at the COT and the third is hosted at Poe Hall. The AD distributed installation packages are also hosted on the domain controllers.

Logical Architecture

The COT hosts a single domain named ‘tx.ad.ncsu.edu’ or ‘TX’ for short. There are two primary OU’s for faculty and staff computer accounts. The first is named ‘Faculty-Staff’ and is being phased out as we cycle in new computer systems. Some common settings are applied to this OU along with frequently used software (like Adobe Reader, KeyClient, Oracle Calendar, etc.) via Group Policy. This OU also serves as a container for several OU’s that are named based on a version of Microsoft Office. Computers were added to the appropriate OU based on the version of Microsoft Office that was purchased with the system and each office based OU has a group policy associated with it to deploy the Office suite.

The second primary OU (and the one that is used for new systems) is named ‘Production’. This OU also has some group policy objects linked to it to apply common settings and install frequently used software. The OU’s contained within are organized primarily by department but also by function. Office and other licensed software are deployed to systems in the Production OU via Group Policy based on security group membership.

User account logon names mirror a person’s unity ID. User accounts are also created for specialty purposes that do not correspond with a unity ID. Workstation computers are generally named with a TX prefix followed by the room number followed by a dash (-) and then a number starting with 01. Servers are named based on function or after a former dean.