Back in April, we received a request to open visibility on the userAccountControl attribute for all UWWI users. This was to enable UW-IT’s Unix Engineering team to leverage UWWI for a Xen eScience project they were working on.

In specific, this was a requirement imposed by Likewise, a Unix-AD interoperability solution, that is nested within the XenServer virtualization product. Seehttp://lists.likewiseopen.org/pipermail/likewise-open-discuss/2009-May/001179.html for more details on the technical requirements.

We didn’t see any serious threat associated with this, and given the interest in Likewise captured by the Delegated OUs survey we had just completed, this seemed like it fit with what other clients would need. So that change was made.

On the related topic of Unix-AD interoperability, I know several departments are interested in this topic, and over the past several months there have been a couple UW-IT projects which touched on this, but aside from the XenServer project noted above, I’m not aware of anyone actively doing/working on this in UWWI yet. If you are looking at this, I’d love to hear from you–it’d be good to start capturing details on some of the solutions being used.