Organisation-wide uids

[Bob Sutterfield]

Though there are technical problems with University-wide, multi-OS uid
schemes, those are probably solvable, given the exertion of enough sweat
by enough talented people.  YP (from Sun), Hesiod (from MIT), and
Vice/Virtue (from CMU) are all steps toward providing bits and pieces of
that "one-world" environment.  Others will surely follow, because there
are lots of talented people out there.

You may find that the biggest problems are political, rather than
technical.  The longer your campus' various disparate computing
communities have been developing, the more entrenched they probably are in
their own procedures, and the more difficult it will be to convince them
of the overriding benefits of unification.  Remember, all those little
computing feifdoms have heretofore been in competition for hardware funds
and talented systems people.  There may be long-standing traditions of, if
not animosity, at least habitual lack of cooperation.

If your campus has a strong, well-respected, well-funded, technically
progressive central computing facility, perhaps they can be instrumental
in pulling it off.  Otherwise, you're in for quite a battle.  Good luck!