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F E A T U R E

MMS: The Muscle Behind the Life Time Fitness Machine

July 8, 2002
By James Hutchinson

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From the Ground Up

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	In this article
	Introduction
	The Building Blocks
	Onward and Upward
	Environmental Concerns
	Web Services Glossary
	From the Ground Up
	Related Sites
	Best Practices

What would you do if you inherited an infrastructure built from a hodgepodge of gear that nobody ever tracked or documented? If you're as fortunate as Jud McKee, Life Time's director of network operations, you'd get to rip it out and start fresh. McKee and his IT team adopted FreeBSD as the server platform, dismantled many of the dozen or so Microsoft PDCs (Primary Domain Controllers) that were wrestling for Windows network control, started a campaign to make Life Time execs take security and authentication seriously, and looked to create some best practices for server administration.

Picking FreeBSD in a world dominated by Windows NT and Solaris was risky for a company that was just starting to get its sea legs in the IT world, but the move paid off for Life Time. Software and licensing costs, which in a typical Microsoft installation can quickly become a millstone around a fledgling enterprise's neck, are nonexistent. But as with any technology choice, you need the proper skill set to manage it. That task fell to Eric Edgar, systems engineer for Life Time Fitness, and his team. "FreeBSD has the best file server performance numbers of any operating system," Edgar says, so the choice made sense for the real-time response requirements of the new MMS. And by incorporating Samba file and print services for Microsoft client compatibility, FreeBSD helped meet all of Life Time's immediate server requirements for its clubs.

Authentication via LDAP directory services lets club employees access MMS based on location and user privilege. The concern was that high employee turnover would make tracking and maintaining an accurate user database unwieldy. Instead, certain stations, such as the main desk area, were set up without user authentication and have limited MMS functions; those stations focus on member check-in and registration.