Nikola 2 Released

We released Nikola 2 for Red Hat 7.3 on Monday, 23 SEP, 2002.

The Solaris 9 release was made on 27 JAN, 2003.

AIX development has been postponed indefinitely.

The major changes from Nikola 1 are:

Linux release is based on Red Hat 7.3
Solaris release is based on Solaris 9
Uses MIT Kerberos 5 for authentication (no more clear-text passwords)
- Accounts are tied directly to the department's Kerberos and LDAP servers. Only one password to remember.
- no need to use ssh-agent.
- Kerberos tickets time out after 10 hours, so Linux users will need to use the krb command once each morning before they can ssh to a remote system. (This will be fixed in a future release.) Solaris users will not need to do this as unlocking the screen saver obtains a new ticket.
Uses AFS (Andrew File System) for /usr/nikola access, no more NFS hangs for administrative filesystems.
Nikola 2 still uses NFS for access to read-write data (home directories and /g/ssli, for example).

Nikola requires a reliable network connection on an EE-department subnet to function.