OSF DCE Administration Guide--Core Components

Managing DCE Hosts

7.3 Testing Whether a DCE Host is Running

Because DCE communications often involve several steps before clients communicate

with their servers, communication failures can be difﬁcult to diagnose. For instance, a

server may not be running on a host or the DCE services may not be currently running,

even though the host has been conﬁgured into the cell. You can use a server ping

operation to test whether a server process is running but, if this fails, you might need a

way to see if the DCE host is even accessible through the network. The DCE control

program’s host ping operation tests whether a host’s DCE services are accessible on the

network, returning a 1 if it is and a 0 if it isn’t accessible.

The host ping operation tests for the presence of the remote host’s DCE daemon (dced).

You can read more about the purpose and use of dced in Chapter 9.

The following example tests whether dced on host duh is accessible on the network:

dcecp> host ping /.:/hosts/duh

7.4 Starting Conﬁgured DCE Processes on a Host

Each host’s DCE daemon (dced) can maintain conﬁguration information for servers set

to run on that particular host. This information is established using an application’s

installation script or by using the server object directly. While the server object

provides its own start operation that can start individual servers on a host, you must

explicitly name each server. The host start operation lets you start all conﬁgured DCE

servers and clients and all conﬁgured application servers on a host with a single

command.

To operate on a remote host, its DCE daemon must be running. Remote host start

operations also require at least one CDS server and one security server to be running in

the cell. The host start operation operates on DCE servers and clients and on

application servers that are conﬁgured by using the server object.

Application servers must be conﬁgured with the starton attribute set to boot or explicit.

You can read more about conﬁguring application servers in Chapter 10.

The following example starts all conﬁgured servers on host bigbox:

dcecp> host start /.:/hosts/bigbox

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