OSF DCE Administration Guide--Core Components

Chapter 9. Managing DCE Host Services and
Host Data
Some services like DTS, CDS, and the DCE Security Service registry, which produce or
maintain cell-wide information, are centralized. Although the services they provide are
available throughout a cell, the servers themselves typically reside on just a few selected
hosts in a cell.
Other DCE services are pervasive; that is, they reside on every host in a DCE cell. The
DCE software that runs on every DCE host provides essential services that enable local
client and server programs to interact with remote client and server programs in a
reliable and secure way. Consequently, each host in a DCE cell has administrative
aspects which are discussed in the first part of this chapter.
Each DCE host maintains local data that is essential to host operation in a DCE
environment. Occasionally, you may find it necessary to modify parts of this data as
your cell configuration changes, or as you add DCE capabilities or DCE applications.
The second part of this chapter discusses how to use the DCE control program to gain
remote, authenticated access to this data.
When DCE operations do not succeed for some reason, you want to inform the right
people about what happened. DCE’s serviceability messaging facility lets you route
error messages based on the severity level of the message. The last part of this chapter
explains how to manage this facility.
9.1 DCE Host Services
Some DCE host services such as the runtime libraries are inert and require no
administration once DCE has been configured on a host. But other services are active
programs. One such active service is the endpoint mapper which acts as a lookup
service on a host. The endpoint mapper lists server communication ports (called
endpoints) in the host’s endpoint map. Remote clients looking for particular servers
query the endpoint mapper which returns information contained in the endpoint map.
The endpoint mapper, along with other active services, are contained in a single program
called the DCE host daemon or dced. Typically, once a host has been configured with
DCE Version 1.1 software, the host booting process starts the dced process along with
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