| dc.description.abstract | Historically, the Computing and Information Services group on campus had not issued personalized user id's (or PUDs) to students. However, in 1992, CIS reversed themselves on this topic. In the ensuing three years, the number of PUDs handed out by CIS has exploded. In 1995, a new fe , the Student Technology Fee, was established as a tax on the students to supply services for the students as directed by the students. One of the side effects of this is that the students wanted to have email accounts for all students starting in the fall of 1995. The CIS department now provides PUDs to all incoming freshmen, in part to meet their obligation to the Student Technology Fee Committee. In order to do this, CIS intends to support a Centralized Flat Name Space (CFNS) system for the entire campus. Using this system, all users would have exactly one user login name across all platforms on campus. However, UAMS has UCls for virtually all OSU users (approximately 15000 at this time). In addition, the UAMS system has many of the features that CIS finds desirable for their support of computing on campus. As a result, CIS has offered to merge their PUD database with the UCI database maintained by UAMS in the Computer Science (COMSC) department if COMSC develops the code to support t his merger on the UAMS side and if COMSC will advise CIS in the development of their part of the code to support t his merger. The resulting CFNS will be accesible by all of the current UAMS supported departments, and will allow CIS to expand the CFNS concept to the entire university. The problem, and the focus of this thesis, is the result of the joint effort between the COMSC Department and CIS here at Oklahoma State University to implement a centralized fiat name space system for the entire campus, based on UDB and UAMS, and further to deal with the merging of the two databases of information (PUDs -vs- UCIs). One of this thesis' goals is to describe how such a modified UAMS system would work, whom it would benefit, and how much work it would require to achieve the goal of a centralized flat name space system. | |
