UNIX Desktop Support is available through Academic Technology and Networks (ATN). Currently, the fee for this service is $1000.00 per workstation per year. An ATN UNIX System Administrator is assigned to install, administer and maintain these workstations. Currently, UNIX machines are supported in eight departments within the College of Arts and Sciences along with machines in the School of Social Work, the School of Public Health, the Institute of Government, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. This unit also supports the UNIX machines used to manage the Campus Network.

These UNIX systems are carefully designed to take full advantage of the services available through the ITS Distributed Computing Initiative (DCI). UNIX Desktop Support is currently available for Sun Microsystems workstations running the Solaris Operating System, Silicon Graphics Workstations running the IRIX Operating System, and intel-based hosts running the linux Operating System. This agreement covers backups, electronic mail, security, system upgrades, and installation of local applications. Many other ITS services become available to the members of participating departments.

Userid management is a single sign-on made possible by creating ISIS user ids for all members of the participating department. Security is enhanced through the use of MIT Athena's Kerberos authentication scheme. The /etc/passwd file on each host is a subset of the master password file for the University, and reflects the function of that particular machine - whether it is for the use of the entire department or for a single faculty member and his/her students.

Each user is granted an allotment of disk space maintained centrally under AFS, our enterprise file system. This disk space appears as and functions as local disk on all of the departmental DCI hosts, on ATN's central Compute Servers, and on the ISIS login nodes. Each department is also granted an allotment of AFS file space for common use.

In addition to the shared applications offered from ATN's common AFS space, applications which are department-specific can be installed in this departmental common space. One of the departmental hosts can be designated as a local license server if the application is not managed by one of ATN's license servers. All users of these systems and their associated departments have access to ATN's MassStore facility for archival data storage at no charge.

All departmental users have access to ATN's Compute Servers for computationally intensive jobs. Departmental users can "launch" their applications from any departmental host and direct them to run on one of the Compute Servers via the Load Sharing Facility (LSF).

ATN's UNIX Desktop Support takes advantage of the many facets of the ITS Distributed Computing Initiative. In addition to increasing the computing power available to the users in the member departments, ATN is able to extend the services of professional UNIX Systems Administrators to the UNIX worstations upon which these departments rely as tools for accomplishing their research goals.