OSF DCE Administration Guide--Core Components

Chapter 5. Managing a DCE Cell

From a cell administrator’s point of view, a DCE cell consists of a set of networked

services that supports the execution of distributed applications. This simple statement,

however, doesn’t really say anything about what services are currently available in your

cell. In fact, the exact number of DCE servers and their locations differs from cell to

cell. Even in the same cell, host and network outages and reconﬁgurations affect service

availability.

Although you could use various service-related dcecp objects to test whether and where

services are available in a cell, it would be cumbersome. Instead, the DCE control

program provides a cell task object that conveniently lists conﬁgured DCE servers and

tests whether services are available. It can also back up critical data maintained by the

DCE Security Service and CDS.

5.1 Showing All Conﬁgured DCE Servers and DCE Hosts

Some DCE cells may be relatively stable, with few DCE hosts or DCE servers being

added or removed. Other cells can be quite dynamic, with hosts and DCE servers being

added, removed, or moved weekly or even daily. In this environment, tracking the

locations of DCE resources can be difﬁcult, so the cell task object has a show operation

that scans various databases in the cell returning the names of conﬁgured DCE servers

and DCE hosts.

One use of a cell show command could be to track performance problems. For example,

maybe many new hosts and users have been added, but the number or location of CDS or

security servers hasn’t grown accordingly. Or perhaps you’ve just been hired to

administer a new cell and you want to see what your cell consists of.

To show conﬁgured DCE servers and hosts in a cell, enter a cell show operation. The

command returns a list of servers grouped by type, along with a list of DCE hosts, as

follows:

secservers Each value is the name of a security server.

cdsservers Each value is the name of a machine running a CDS server. The name is

the simple name found under /.:/hosts. A clearinghouse must be

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