Implementing Nebula Bronze Services

Nebula Support staff are available for consultation on the initial Bronze conversions within a department. Subsequent conversions, and all support, will be handled by the client’s local support staff, who are responsible for performing the following activities.

Local support staff:

Adding a new system to the Nebula domain:

1. Ensure that the system is running a fully patched Windows XP Professional operating system, and the current anti-virus software.
2. Log into the local administrative account using the local administrative password.
3. Add the correct WINS settings to any active network connection.
4. Using your Nebula credentials, join the system to the Nebula2 domain. Do not reboot. After the reboot and the application of the Nebula policies, the built-in administrator account will be renamed and the password will be changed, so this account will become unavailable for your use. The built-in guest account will be changed in the same way. Thus, you should add any Nebula2 groups or accounts to the local admin group prior to rebooting the system and finishing the domain join. You will use these Nebula2 accounts in the future to perform functions requiring administrative privileges. Nebula will remove any non-Nebula2 accounts in the LAG.
   • You may create other, administrator-level local accounts. Information on migrating profiles is found at Migrating Files and Settings.
5. Reboot and log into the Nebula2 domain with an authorized Nebula account, to apply domain group policy and see the H: and I: drives.
6. Email the names of the new Bronze systems to nebula @ u.washington.edu, so they can be claimed into the correct domain organizational unit as Bronze devices, and added to the appropriate department for billing purposes.

Removing and re-adding a system:

You may need to remove and re-add a system to a domain, for renaming or troubleshooting purposes. Prior to removing the system, you must create a local account and add it to the local admin group. You will use this account once the system has been rebooted to log in, and then re-add it to the domain with your Nebula credentials. We suggest you delete this local account afterward to remove the possibility that it could be compromised. Nebula currently does no password strength checking on local accounts.

On-going Technical Support

Local support staff are responsible for managing and maintaining all aspects of the Nebula Bronze computer. For each Bronze computer, a single email address will be identified by the local support staff as the "managed by" contact for that computer. Regular scans are done of all Nebula computers to identify security vulnerabilities. For Bronze computers, these reports will be emailed to the "managed by" contact for the computer. Local support staff are responsible for fixing any problem indicated by the scans, within a reasonable timeframe.

Firewalls on Bronze computers

Local support staff should familiarize themselves with the Firewalls on Nebula Bronze Workstation and Local Servers page. This page describes the various firewall options which are available, and the limits of support for each.

The local support staff is the conduit between the Nebula support team and the Bronze clients, and all questions and requests will be forwarded via the local support staff. These folks should verify the problem and collect needed data before escalating it to Nebula Support. A page for Nebula Bronze clients has been set up to give these clients basic information about Nebula services.

If you have questions or suggestions, please forward them to nebula-support @ cac.washington.edu.