The word is that Microsoft Corp will effectively have to dump its entire Domains security model due to its non-scalability, poor documentation and design, and inability to operate over the internet, hears our sister publication Unigram.X. Instead, NT 5 will likely get an installable Unix-style model, using Kerberos as authentication. Microsoft will switch – as covertly as possible to avoid losing face – to the new model and will be very careful to avoid the problems of compatibility and calls of I told you so from the Unix crowd. It’s a fate that our sister publication ClieNT Server News first hinted at towards the end of last year in the wake of an industry tete a tete on Microsoft’s Common Internet File System (CIFS). CIFS, it should be noted, is based in part on the Server Message Block protocol for distributed file sharing that’s been an X/Open-Open Group PC-Unix interoperability standard for years. It seems that a spec for the next version of CIFS on the table at a meet to be hosted by CIFS- lover Santa Cruz Operation Inc in April has been broken into new and obsolete sections and that there are still a lot of changes left, though none in particular is a very big deal. The Domains model NT currently uses is based upon MS Net technology. Backwards compatibility will be an issue and NT would have to be re-evaluated for the B1 security it currently boasts if this is made so.
