Dear All,
We are interested in bringing 2 of our NMR instruments under MS Domain (Miscrosoft XP based) structure in order to streamline access, and to be compliant with university-wide IT policies. Though it can be done in principle, I have been reluctant to say "go ahead"; I have listed a few reasons below. There could be more important ones, which I might not have included due to my ignorance.
(a) unexpected downtime to the instruments due to worm, virus, and other malicious network attacks followed by time-consuming reloading and reconfiguring operating system and NMR-system software
(b) the spectrometer computer is accessible to IT administrators, who in most part are not familiar with the details of the NMR system software programs and their interaction with the windows operating system software. "doing things which impact negatively the operation of the instrument"
(c) following policies such as automatic downloading of operating system upgrades, which is more of a norm than an exception; my main concern is that the instrument vendors in terms of their software (e.g. topspin by Bruker) will always be behind and an "upgrade" might negatively impact the operation of the NMR instrument
(d) increase in workload, as we run the instruments with limited number of login accounts (either supervisor based "group" accounts or single); the facilities have 6 instruments and it will increase to 7 soon, and we have two staff members
I would like to have your input on the "pros" and "cons" of moving NMR instruments to a centralized (university/institution wide) Microsoft XP-based domain structure. Also please include in your reply:
How many NMR instruments are in your NMR facility?
How many are under Microsoft windows based domain?
A brief description of your experience in this regard
I would extremely appreciate your reply.
Thanks in advance,
Santhana
Dr. Santhana Velupillai
Director of NMR Facilities
University of Iowa
Department of Chemistry
Iowa City, IA 52242
Received on Thu Jan 08 2009 - 06:25:58 MST