Infrastructure

Domain Name System (DNS)

The EECS department maintains the DNS tables for most networks in Soda and Cory halls. The majority of requests for changes to DNS should be made via the online System Registration and Update forms. For unusual DNS requests, contact dns@eecs.

DHCP clients will automatically be provided with the correct addresses for DNS servers.

See also:

• How do I get my computer on the network?

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol allows clients to request an IP address and other related network settings when they start up, rather than being configured with this information statically. This service provides a number of benefits:

• More efficient use of limited IP address space.
• Easier portability of systems from network to network.
• Easier system administration if changes are made to back-end systems (such as DNS servers).

DHCP clients in EECS are identified by the hardware MAC address of their ethernet card. The DHCP server will not assign addresses to hosts which are unknown to it. To notify the DHCP server about your host, you’ll need to register it.

The DHCP server can be configured to assign a fixed hostname to a particular client, if that client needs to be consistently resolvable on the network. We encourage all clients to use DHCP on networks where DHCP is available.

Directory Services

The departmental directory server is a unix LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server. All IRIS Account holders have records in the LDAP server, which contain the standard office and telephone contact information, as well as username and group information. Applications are increasingly being integrated with LDAP directory services, such as our Sympa mailing list server and the Repo service.

All IRIS account holders can create and manage their own LDAP groups with the Regroup application.

As of January 2014, LDAP no longer contains a separate password. All password authentication is handed off to Windows Active Directory. See this IRIS News item for details.

See also:

• How do I get an EECS account?
• How do I set my LDAP/e-mail password?
• Regroup: Create and Manage LDAP Groups

Network Time Protocol (NTP)

Network Time Protocol allows hosts to synchronize their clocks with a trusted time source, over the network.

If for any reason a UNIX system needs to run its own NTP service, see the SWW templates for Cory Hall and Soda Hall.

Windows clients in the EECS domain are automatically synchronized.

See also:

• IRIS Network Services