UW Windows Infrastructure

UWWI is a fully-redundant service, striving for 100% service availability. UWWI runs on Active Directory, and has many features based on that technology that may not be fully described here.

Authentication Services

UWWI provide authentication services (authN) for all active UW NetIDs. UWWI has the password for each UW NetID, and can be used for Kerberos authentication, NTLMv2 authentication, NTLMv1 authentication, or LDAP authentication. Users change their UW NetID password via the standard UW NetID manage page. UW NetID creation and password changes are synchronized to UWWI in near real-time.

Authorization Services

UWWI provides authorization services (authZ) for all active UW NetIDs. Login tokens obtained from UWWI include group information that can be used to access resources that have granted access to these groups or the users themselves. UWWI provides groups hourly synchronized from the UW Groups Service that include course groups, affiliation groups, individually managed groups, and groups formed from institutional data sources.

Directory Services

UWWI provides directory services for all active UW NetIDs. LDAP compliant clients can be used to lookup some person-related directory information. Directory information currently includes name, affiliations, UW-IT UID, UW NetID, and a 'UWRegID' which are obtained from the enterprise person directory (EDS). A picture of the existing Active Directory structure is available.

Name Resolution Services

UWWI provides NetBIOS name resolution services in the form of a WINS service. Campus computers can be configured to use this WINS service to register their NetBIOS names and assist in NetBIOS name resolution of other computers. NetBIOS name resolution should not be considered a replacement for DNS, and UWWI leverages the central campus DNS service.

Windows Domain Services

UWWI provides UW NetID based authentication for UW clients using the Windows platform leveraging Windows domain membership. Departments with existing Windows domains can setup a one way trust to UWWI from their domain or request a delegated OU to move their computers into. You can review known use cases via trust and via delegated OUs.

UW Windows Forest

The UW forest provides a legacy central Windows forest (windows.washington.edu) for departments which deployed a Windows 2000 domain. New domains are no longer accepted. Instead consider adoption of a delegated OU in the Netid domain (UWWI).

Microsoft Activation Services

UWWI provides Microsoft product activation services for activating Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Office 2010 on the UW campus network via the Microsoft Key Management Server functionality.