USENIX Association

Central to the development of the Internet, and the resulting business paradigm shifts, has been the adoption of standards which have provided the necessary framework for computer systems to cooperate and exchange information. The next major step necessary to support the continuation of this process is the development of software protocols and tools which provide the ability to manage the delivery of services to users. This paper describes a Linux-based middleware initiative which has been deployed at North Dakota State University to support a Category of Service information delivery system for the North Dakota Higher Education Computing Network. The system was designed to support a computing model where the majority of the service infrastructure is supplied by Linux servers and which is extensible to the 11 state institutions comprising the HECN. The paper begins with a discussion of middleware and its importance in the development of next-generation information systems. Included in this discussion are the topics of identification, authentication and authorization and the requirement for them in a modern middleware solution. Central to this topic will be a discussion of the potential threat that proprietary middleware solutions pose to the continued penetration of Open Source efforts into the enterprise computing model. The paper then discusses in detail the design and architecture of the User Services Management System which implements the middleware solution at NDSU. The three fundamental components discussed will be the User Services DataBase, LDAP meta-directory services and the User Account Management System . Discussion of the system architecture will include details of how standard services have been modified to operate under middleware control. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the implications of this work. Also included is a discussion of the next generation of the system architecture.