The academic NC State computing environment has been based on MIT
Kerberos for XXXX (how long?) Historically, when we've needed to
support LAN systems that did not directly support Kerberos, we've
synchronized the accounts and passwords into multiple authentication
databases.

While this was necessary and desirable in order to provide
services at all, synchronization does present significant cost and
fragility over using a common authentication system directly.

There are some well publicized and long standing issues with
Microsoft Kerberos not integrating well with Kerberos implementations
from other sources, such as our MIT Kerberos.

One issue that impacts this campus is Microsoft's inability to
forward credentials (“tickets”) successfully from one
administrative domain (“cell”) to another, unless all the domains
involved are running an MS KDC.

Purpose

OIT's Integration Services team is charged with providing a common Windows computing environment for the NC State community. Historically, we have delivered Windows desktop services using Novell's NetWare and ZENWorks technologies. However, those products no longer serve our academic needs. After a careful cost-benefit analysis, we selected Microsoft's Active Directory technologies to replace Novell.

OIT provides "Unity" user accounts with allow access to a wide variety of campus IT resources to all faculty, staff, and students at NC State University.