OSF DCE Administration Guide--Core Components

Introduction to the DCE Directory Service
any given time, while a parent can have more than one child.
The GDA is the communications gateway between the CDS namespaces of cells in a
hierarchy, as it is between CDS and the global directory services. When the GDA
receives a request for information about a cell, and the cell is a child cell, the GDA
returns information about the CDS in the parent cell. The CDS of the parent cell
provides the pointers to the child cell.
A child cell’s name begins with the parent’s global cell name; that is, the name of the
cell beginning at the global root /... prefix. (This name is also known as the parent cell’s
fully-qualified name.) It ends with the specific child cell name. The parent’s global
name can contain CDS syntax as well as GDS or DNS syntax, depending on where the
parent cell is located in the hierarchy.
The following example shows the global cell names of two child cells:
Global Cell Name for Sales1
------------------------ˆ---------------------------
/
Parent Global Cell Name Child Cell
--------------ˆ-------------------------- --ˆ--
/ / |
/.../C=US/O=XYZ/OU=Portland/subsys/PriceMax/Sales1
Global Cell Name for Marketing
_______________________ˆ____________________________
/
Parent Global Cell Name Child Cell
--------------ˆ-------------------------- ---ˆ--
/ / |
/.../C=US/O=XYZ/OU=Portland/subsys/PriceMax/Marketing
The global cell name for each child includes
• The parent’s global name, /.../C=US/O=XYZ/OU=Portland
• The child’s unique CDS name, /Sales1 or /Marketing
If a DCE administrator is establishing a hierarchy of cells during initial cell
configuration, he or she must obtain a unique GDS or DNS cell name for the cell at the
top of the hierarchy from the GDS or DNS global directory service authorities. All of the
cells beneath this cell share this name. The provides details on how to obtain GDS and
DNS cell names.
If a DCE administrator establishes a hierarchy of cells after the cells have been
configured, the global names of the child cells change to point to the parent’s cell name.
Chapter 21 of this guide provides details on how to establish a hierarchy of cells.
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