From Practice

SURF is the cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions. One of the goals of our organization is to facilitate research with HPC (High Performance Computing). We run national super computer clusters and provide computing power, data transport, data management and analysis for the Dutch academic community, i.e. to universities, universities of applied science, […]

Certificates – Why and What for In this article I would like to give you an insight into the topic “Securing the Internet-based exchange of information through certificates”. I’ll take a quick look back at the beginnings of the Internet and the use of protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, POP … and their encrypted transport […]

Since the introduction of single sign-on support in Univention Corporate Server (UCS) via Secure Authentication Markup Language (SAML), an administrator can assign a user within the user object to those applications, called service providers in the SAML context, he or she can log in to via single sign-on. As for administrators in organizations with many […]

In our 4-minute film tutorial we will show you how to add a Windows 10 computer to your UCS domain. First, we will prepare the UCS domain by installing the software package “Active Directory Domain Controller” from the Univention App Center. The Active Directory Domain Controller is an app which extends UCS with Active Directory […]

By default, UCS users can enter the password incorrectly any number of times without being locked out by the system. In order to make brute force attacks to crack passwords more difficult, admins can set up an automatic lockout that prevents an account from being accessed after a user-defined number of failed attempts. Univention Corporate […]

Every systemadministrator has this problem: When did I set up this one function or when did I change the password? To answer these questions we have developed a diary for sysadmins: UCS Admin Diary. The application provides a quick overview of all administrative events in a UCS domain. This includes software and app installations and […]

In larger environments with thousands of users, you can often find multiple Domain Controller offering authentication and authorization services. For Windows-based endpoints, UCS utilizes Samba 4 to provide these services. In between the different Samba 4 servers, UCS uses the Domain Replication Service (DRS) to keep the server data synchronized. While Samba 4 does a […]

Obviously, your first name, cat’s name or mother-in-law’s birthday are not good passwords. Also password or 123456 (actually to be found on the list of the most frequently chosen passwords!) are out of the question. As the administrator of a UCS domain, you can’t prevent users from writing down their passwords or storing them under […]

For the IT administration of organizations with many users, typically also schools, it can be very useful to regulate the access to external websites. From a technical point of view, in order to improve performance when accessing frequently visited pages, but also in terms of restricting access to certain pages, e.g. for security reasons or […]

More Services, More Space, Less Downtime? Anyone operating IT services for companies or organisations will sooner or later be confronted with this: everything is growing, you need more space for data and virtual machines, at the same time the demands for the availability of services are increasing and the hardware servers also need to be […]