The following paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Eleventh Systems Administration Conference (LISA ’97) San Diego, California, October 1997 For more information about USENIX Association contact: 1. Phone: 510 528-8649 2. FAX: 510 548-5738 3. Email:
[email protected] 4. WWW URL:http://www.usenix.org Shuse At Two: Multi-Host Account Administration Henry Spencer – SP Systems ABSTRACT The Shuse multi-host account administration system [1] is now two years old, and clearly a success. It is managing a user population of 20,000+ at Sheridan College, and a smaller but more demanding population at a local ‘‘wholesaler ’’ ISP, Cancom. This paper reviews some of the experiences along the way, and attempts to draw some lessons from them. Shuse: Outline and Status After some trying moments early on, Shuse is very clearly a success. In mid-autumn 1996, Sheridan Shuse [1] is a multi-host account administration College’s queue of outstanding help-desk requests was system designed for large user communities (tens of two orders of magnitude shorter than it had been in thousands) on possibly-heterogeneous networks. It previous years, despite reductions in support man- adds, deletes, moves, renames, and otherwise adminis- power. Favorable comments were heard from faculty ters user accounts on multiple servers, with functional- who had never previously had anything good to say ity generally similar to that of Project Athena’s Ser- about computing support. However, there was natu- vice Management System [2]. rally still a wishlist of desirable improvements. Shuse uses a fairly centralized architecture. All At around the same time, ex-Sheridan people user/sysadmin requests go to a central daemon were involved in getting Canadian Satellite Communi- (shused) on a central server host, via gatekeeper pro- cations Inc.