RE: [IMail Forum] DataBase

[Cal Frye]

We're just finding in educational settings that the LAN spans the whole campus. A mobile student, laptop in hand, logs in from dorm room to classroom to library. There's no logical reason to divide them into separate domains, and logistical problems with doing such. And we'll make it even more messy with Macintosh a popular educational platform. (our user profiles and home directories are on a Mac server, even for our NT accounts!) Reserve is a smaller institution than my former employer, Kent State, but KSU was running into similar troubles with folks wanting access to their dorm printer, department data store, and the library resources from any of these locations....   I don't pretend to have the answer to directory tree / domain architecture, but I'm always wondering if I've got the best setup I can have, and always interested in opinions. Thanks for the insight.   --Cal Frye, Western Reserve Academy, Hudson, Ohio -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Ricardo Freire Sent: Friday, September 17, 1999 5:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] DataBase As far as the user limitation of NT, why, if I have 20000 students, should I have to place them in more than a single domain? Domain structure should reflect organization structure and resource allocation, not arbitrary or performance limitations. NDS has been shown to scale to over a billion objects (users, servers, printers, etc), and NT has lots of catching up to do.   The point is that NT domain system was designed to network access - and administration. I'm not sure it's a good thing to manage 20000 students' network access as ONE organizational structure. Simply put, a domain should cover a LAN, and several domains should take care of a WAN.   Looking from another standpoint: as an ISP, you have tens of thousands email accounts. But not *all* those people should logon to the LOCAL network where the mail server is located (I know it's not really the case, because IMail uses local NT SAM, but the limitations of this approach appear here too, because you're putting too much people into the server's security context).   I'm not saying NT domain is good or bad. I just don't think it was designed for this purpose. OTOH, Win2k Active Directory claims to do it all...  :-)   Cheers,   Ricardo Freire, MCP