## Integration of User and Group Accounts

If you have hundreds of users who expect to move effortlessly between UNIX and Windows NT resources, you face a serious integration effort. The usual goal is to have Windows NT users access a UNIX file system. It is an extremely time-consuming and risky effort to try to keep UNIX and Windows NT user names and passwords hand-coordinated. Most administrators want to avoid this kind of a situation. Because UNIX and Windows NT do not share a common security system, integrating the two systems requires choosing the dominant system. If you are coming from a UNIX background, you may be tempted to try to make Windows NT computers use the UNIX system for authentication. In fact, there are ways to make Windows NT use the UNIX NIS system for authentication. You may prefer, and even find it easier, to implement the most common situation where a Windows NT computer accesses a UNIX file system.

At the moment, all of the solutions depend on third-party vendors or public domain software. The quality and sophistication of security integration vary by product and vendor, and several strategies can be implemented. These schemes may map UNIX users and groups to Windows NT equivalents using a special mapping file or possibly a UNIX-style password file stored on the Windows NT computer.

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Last Updated: December 1, 1997