Distributed administration

Distributed administration allows you to manage entities (for example, users and printers) that may be associated with several systems in a network rather than being attached to one system. It is particularly important for enterprise installations where large numbers of systems must be maintained in a consistent state. Examples of distributed administration include:

• Managing the accounts of users and groups who may log into many systems on the network -- using NIS Network Information Service.

• Creating distributed home accounts so users have the same work environment regardless of the system they may log into -- using NIS and automount.

• Sending messages to all machines on the network -- using rwall(1Mtcp).

• Collecting system performance information from all machines on the network and generating failure alerts -- using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and system monitoring technologies.

Both remote and distributed administration can be done with SCOadmin managers, which are graphical administration interfaces supplied with UnixWare 7.