Lab Questions; Occam's KISS

Lab Questions

I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the article "Our World, Welcome to It" (Sept. 25, 2003).

I have a question about the NWC Inc. lab: There appears to be no firewall between it and the Internet. Shouldn't there be a firewall between NWC Inc., the Internet, and the main Green Bay network, to isolate NWC Inc.?
Dave Shipman
[email protected]

The article on Network Computing's labs said you use automated procedures, including Ghost and Microsoft RIS, to install and configure operating systems in your Syracuse University labs. What can you tell me about your solutions for replicating NT servers? I believe Ghost and RIS are for workstations only. Installation scripts are of limited use in our environment, and I wondered if you had any tricks for duplicating/replicating NT servers with custom configs and software loads.
Robert Callahan
Manager of Technology Research and Integration
Company name withheld by request

Ron Anderson replies: Regarding the firewall, we will be implementing a Cisco PIX firewall in front of NWC Inc. in the near future. For now we're using access-control lists on the Cisco Catalyst 4500 switch.As for replicating NT servers, you're right--they offer a unique challenge. We aren't content with our current solution, and we'll be looking at other options in the near future. One note: RIS now supports Windows 2000/2003 server deployments as well as 2000 and XP client deployment. I haven't played with the server deployment much, but I am very impressed with the flexibility of the RIS client distribution.

Occam's KISS

I thought Mike Lee's column on complexity was interesting and appropriate, but a little shy on history ("Technology: Not as Easy as It Looks," Sept. 25, 2003). No disrespect to software engineer Matt Quail, but the complexity issue and the "solution" are a lot older.

In the 14th century, philosopher William of Occam gave us Occam's Razor. Simply put, William said that if you have two equally effective solutions to a problem, the simpler of the two is better. Mathematicians follow the Razor to evaluate proofs of theorems.
Chuck Wasere
Software marketing consultant
[email protected]

No Backup?

Regarding the article "AD School of Hard Knocks" (Sept. 4, 2003), I'm not being facetious, but how about doing an "authoritative" restore from a system-state backup, rather than rebuilding Active Directory entirely from scratch?
Julie Schneider
Manager, Networking and Telecommunications; Foss Maritime Co.

[email protected]

Dan Wohlbruck replies: The answer is, I'm afraid, obvious. Our recovery scheme did not include a backup--instead our scheme consisted of mirrored drives and replication. The technology division does not have backup media, though the main campus servers do use tape.

The issue of authoritative restores is interesting, nonetheless. In the fine print, you are told that an authoritative restore can be accomplished only by using the same "address" space as the original backup. I've tried many backup-restore combinations: backup to another place on the same hard drive, copy it to a second hard drive and restore from there, and so on. The only one that ever worked was to back up to the same hard drive and restore it immediately. Needless to say, this scheme offers no protection for hard drive failures. Since we have no tape drives, I wasn't able to test restores from tape.

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