CERN Accelerating science

Abstract

This article summarises the history of 15 years of Novell in the context of desktop services at CERN.

The switch-off of the last 2 Novell servers on January 31st 2003 and the progressive phase-out of NICE95 and NICENT4 marked the end of the Novell era at CERN which lasted some 15 years. It was initially introduced in the SPS Division to link three or four PCs working on electronics design tasks, but was rapidly expanded to cover other applications as well, when the benefits of networking were realised.

With the arrival of Ethernet (the thin coaxial cable at that time) in 1988, the first local area networks were created almost simultaneously in PS and SPS divisions. The first servers ran Novell Netware 2.10, while the desktop PCs were equipped with a MS-DOS 3.2, and Windows 2.11 operating system. The typical memory of these machines was 640Kb and the hard disks had a capacity of 40Mb!

Rapidly the user community reached a few hundred users and additional servers were installed. A major improvement came with Netware 2.15 where AppleTalk support was introduced allowing file and printer sharing with the Macintoshes. NFS support was added in a later upgrade from Netware 2.15 to version 3.10.

In 1991, a collaboration between several divisions produced a common CERN wide desktop service, centrally managed by the CN division. NICE was born, based on a core team in CN division and supported by divisional collaborators and representatives.

The initial NICE infrastructure was built around Netware 3 servers and Windows 3.1 desktops, but was rapidly migrated to Netware 4 servers. A Directory Service for the whole of CERN, containing all global objects (servers, printers, users, groups) was designed and implemented.

The server infrastructure grew quickly to more than 20 high-end machines and an update of the Netware Directory Service tree was required to face the constantly growing number of objects. In addition, and several procedures were designed to automate the creation and maintenance of user objects in this new environment, like user accounts, home directories, divisional volumes, and printers.

In 1996, Windows 3.1 was replaced by Windows 95, the first operating system locally installed on the user's machine (Windows 3.1 was actually running from the network servers). This was the start of the NICE 95 service as known today.

In 1998, Windows NT 4 (NICE-NT) was deployed in parallel to NICE95. The CERN Windows NT domain infrastructure to support the new NT4 desktops was deployed. After several software upgrades, this initial CERN domain is still the basic layer of today's Active Directory in NICE2000. The NICE95 clients were also upgraded to enable connectivity to the NT server environment.

A mirror of the NICE infrastructure with its CERN domain was implemented in various divisions for specific needs and to provide a redundancy in case of unavailability of the central services. For example, mirrors were made in EP and PS divisions for the ISOLDE and ATLAS experiments as well as in the main accelerator control room.

In the year 2000, the mixed Netware-Windows infrastructure was merged into a single homogeneous environment based on Windows 2000 and Active Directory which implemented single sign-on for all Windows services.

A mammoth server-side migration was launched in June 2000 to replace all Novell servers with their Windows 2000 equivalents whilst migrating the Novell Directory Service to the CERN Active Directory. When this process was completed, the Windows 2000 desktop service (NICE2000) was launched and roughly 6000 PCs NICE 2000 PCs were deployed to the end users over the next 2 years.

The Novell infrastructure was dismantled and reduced to the strict minimum (2 servers) just for the installation of NICE95 and NT4. Connectivity to Novell was disabled on all NICE95-NT4 desktops, which resulted in the end of a double logon and no need anymore for password synchronisation.

With the switch-off of the 2 remaining Novell servers on January 31st 2003, a final point was marked on the 15 years history of Novell at CERN.

The next important milestone is the phase-out of the support for NICE95-NT4 as of April 1st 2003, and the introduction of NICEXP to be announced soon. Users who still need to install Windows 95 or Windows NT 4 can find more information on this subject at: http://cern.ch/win/services/installation/cdimages.