Migration update
99.9% of all managed workstations have been migrated to the NETID domain, and today we’ll be removing the 5 remaining workstations still in the Nebula2 domain. We greatly appreciate your partnership in both the user and computer migrations over the past couple years. Your patience while we completed this large undertaking has been amazing.
I’m also happy to report that new computers can be enabled for Managed Workstation services without the Nebula2 domain. https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/mws/hardware/adding-computer/ documents the steps needed to do that—it’s available today. In a nutshell, you now can “claim” your computer before joining it to the domain.
If you join a computer to the NETID domain without first completing that step, you’ll end up with a workstation that isn’t usable until someone on the NETID domain service team has intervened (send an email to help@uw.edu if you end up in this situation). This behavior is part of the design of the NETID domain service, and is a consequence of sharing the NETID domain with hundreds of other UW organizations. We are working on a more streamlined way to enable the workflow, leveraging the Managed Workstation imaging process. For resource constraint reasons, that work has had to wait while we focused on workstation migrations, but I’m hopeful we’ll have an even better option in the near future.
Now that the users and computers are in the NETID domain, there will be some minor planned outages over the next month to complete migration of remaining infrastructure. We’ll also start adopting the optional capabilities the NETID domain service provides, which was part of the value proposition behind undertaking this migration. An early candidate is the Local Admin Password Solution (LAPS) feature (https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/msinf/ous/laps/), which will reduce the risk to all Managed Workstation customers from a single computer being compromised. We’ll share more about that when we’re ready to release it.
Brian Arkills
Managed Workstation service owner