UW Forest

In mid-February 2013 the UW Windows Forest service will end.

Service Description

The UW forest is a service offered by UW-IT to provide central support for basic forest services (global catalog servers, schema management, and limited enterprise admin responsibilities).

The current state of the UW Forest has 10 UW organizations with domains.

Service Lifecycle and Alternative Services

This service is not available to new customers. Existing UW Forest customers are encouraged to migrate out. UW-IT has been discouraging use of this service since 2003, with broad customer buy-in to this stance.

UW-IT recommends that customers instead use the central NETID Windows domain which is part of the UW Windows Infrastructure line of business.

Customer Resources

Customers should be actively pursuing migration out of the UW Forest. From a high-level your options are:

• UWWI Delegated OU.
  • Get a delegated OU via the UWWI NETID Windows domain.
  • Migrate your existing domain either with UW-IT migration assistance or do-it-yourself migration.
• New Windows domain and forest
  • Request a new DNS domain
  • Build a new Windows domain
  • Migrate your existing domain (possibly leveraging tips from the UW Forest migration blueprint)
  • Request a trust to the NETID Windows domain.

UW-IT has migrated most of its domains out of the UW forest, and created a blueprint from that experience.

UW Forest Policy

Windows domains in the UW forest:

• Have a vulnerability to the exploit described in the MS02-001 bulletin
• Must follow Domain and Domain Controller Policy
• Can't run Microsoft Exchange
• Should follow a change management practice of notifying other domain admins in the UW forest via the win2k mailing list prior to making service affecting changes to their domain controllers

UW Forest Service Documents

• Domain and Domain Controller Policy
• Required Group Policy settings
• UW Forest Stats
• Diagnosing domain controller issues