Migrating workstations to the NETID domain
Managed Workstation is migrating workstations from the Nebula2 domain to the NETID domain.
What and When:
Beginning Monday, May 22nd at 5pm, and every night through Friday June 2nd, we will attempt to automatically migrate a set of managed workstations to the NETID domain. Any given managed workstation will be scheduled for one night during this period, and we will publish the schedule next week.
There are two user impacts of this work:
-computers that are being migrated will be rebooted, with a user visible 5 minute warning message when the migration agent is ready to initiate the reboot
-the computer’s name will change from xxx.clients.nebula2.washington.edu to xxx.clients.uw.edu
Users will continue to log into their managed workstation with their NETID user.
Because all Managed Workstation customers are impacted by this work and may need to take action, we also plan to notify all users via the mws-users@uw.edu mailing list. That notification is planned for Wednesday, May 17th and will include a link to the schedule so users can take appropriate action when needed.
What you need to do:
If you are a department contact, we’d appreciate if you make sure folks in your department know to expect a notification from us via the mws-users mailing list. We don’t often use that mailing list, so there may not be strong trust associated with it. It also wouldn’t hurt for folks to hear about this planned work more than once.
Plan to ensure your managed workstation is turned on and on the UW network on the day it is scheduled for migration.
If you remote desktop to your managed workstation, adjust your practices after your computer is migrated. First, connect to the VPN, then remote desktop to your computer’s new name.
More info:
Domain migrations are a pretty standard activity, and UW-IT’s Microsoft Infrastructure service (who we are leveraging) has experience doing tens of thousands of these migrations using the same automated toolset as planned here. Failure rates are extremely low. So we do not expect significant problems, but with ~3500 computers to migrate, there will be a few which encounter problems. if there are problems which result in an unusable workstation, we will treat it as an urgent issue and prioritize returning the workstation to service. You can call 221-5000 or send an email to help@uw.edu and let the UW-IT Service Center know that you are experiencing an incident with your managed workstation.
Managed workstations, which have an underscore character (_) in their name, will need some extra preparation. Early this week, we plan to send a notification to the primary user and contacts of the 381 computers, which have an underscore, character in their name, to let them know about our plans to resolve that.
If your managed workstation cannot be migrated on the day it is scheduled, it will be for one of several reasons. We will attempt to contact customers to resolve any issues and re-attempt a later migration.
Migration scheduling is not planned to follow department boundaries. This is for several reasons, which include avoiding the potential to impact an entire department. If your department has a significant scheduling issue during this 2-week period, please let us know and we will try to accommodate you.
Dawn Cullerton
Service Manager
Managed Workstation
UW Information Technology
Phone: 206-685-3071