I am a member of the research staff at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. My job is to design and deploy computing infrastructure which services the PARC community, and to work with the user service / sysadmin folks to keep things running smoothly. I have a particular focus on system security. My computing environment has had services run primarily on UNIX, with a collection of UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows clients. Like so many sites, we are starting to move our core infrastructure from UNIX servers to NT as our client base shifts from primarily UNIX to primarily NT so that our applications can take advantage of the tight coupling with services provided by NT. My recent UNIX activity includes integrating Kerberos 5 with AFS, integrating Kerberos 5 with token cards, finishing the deployment of Kerberos services on UNIX servers, and redesigning/deploying the firewall I built three years ago.

My new set of projects involve analysis and possible deployment of services based on NT to replace or augment our UNIX based services. I am particularly interested in integration between NT5 Kerberos and MIT/Cygnus Kerberos V, LDAP integration between NT and other systems, system configuration and management, scaling, and large scale system administration. In particular, Xerox is in the process of deploying NT/Exchange infrastructure to service some 60,000 desktops.

I am particularly concerned with security issues related to NT. PARC moved most of our services from XNS (which has integrated directory services, strong authentication, etc) to UNIX. At the time UNIX lacked the integration which was taken for granted in XNS. After many years, we finally have a UNIX based computing environment which begins to equal what XNS provided. Part of my job is to see that we don't take a step backwards as we migrate to NT.

Mark Verber
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
415-812-4929
verber@parc.xerox.com
https://www.parc.xerox.com/verber/