Impact on IS Service

Pismere is intended to have a major impact on the user community at MIT while having a minimal impact on IS Service. We intended to achieve that by introducing as few new services as possible. For most service teams, the impact of Pismere will be an increase in demand on existing services. We do not expect most teams to have to acquire major new skills or personnel. Traditionally IS Service has been able to ignore Microsoft operating systems. They have not had to run many NT servers, or provide file services for Windows. Project Pismere will change this. However, Pismere, unlike other NT domains will require a minimal number of NT servers to be run. We do not expect Service to run and support NT file servers, print servers, or application servers. Service will be responsible for the operation of the NT Domain Controllers, e.g. the Active Directory Service. Service will continue to manage most of their operational data via Moira. However, this data will need to be replicated to the Microsoft servers.

Existing services that are provided are expected to experience a higher demand. For example, we will be adding a significant number of AFS clients to the MIT network. Also, more users will be printing through the lpds managed by Athena Operations.