Distributed Name Service (DNS) Management Operations Manual

Ways to Use DNS Programmatically
Introducing Distributed Name Service
31258 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1–5
Users of DNS If you are a system manager or system operator, you typically communicate with DNS
through DNSCOM, the DNS interactive interface. This interface allows you to create
the DNS database, control the DNS processes, and perform inquiry and update
operations against the DNS name database. For example, you might ask DNS to break
down a group into the individual objects that compose it and to display the names of
those objects. Then, you could apply a particular operation to all objects in the group
or to a single member.
You might want to use Enform (a database management tool) to run queries against
the DNS database. The DNS database is the collection of all names defined to DNS
along with information about those names. Refer to the ENFORM User’s Guide for
details about using Enform.
You write management applications that use the DNS database. These applications
can be COBOL85, C, or TAL programs or TACL macros. They interact with DNS
through the Subsystem Programmatic Interface (SPI) supplied by Tandem for
subsystems used in management environments. Refer to the Distributed Name Service
(DNS) Management Programming Manual and the Distributed Systems Management
(DSM) Programming Manual for more information about writing management
applications for DNS.
Ways to Use DNS
Programmatically
Management applications can use DNS in many ways. Three examples are:
Name breakdown. Many applications use DNS to break down group names into
the names of member objects. This is usually done when referring to a set of
objects that must be used at a particular time, such as when a programmed
operator needs to start all terminals in the western United States at 8:00 a.m. PST
or shut them down at 5:30 p.m. PST.
For instance, a group of terminals in San Francisco, identified by the group name
SF-TERMS, might be TERM-36, TERM-37, TERM-44, and so on.
Retrieving a subsystem-object name. Another application might be an intelligent
command processor that accepts aliases for objects, uses DNS to convert them into
the correct subsystem-object names, and then acts upon the corresponding objects,
as shown in Figure 1-2. This DNS feature of translating the alias into the correct
subsystem-object name is called name resolution.