OSF DCE Administration Guide--Introduction

Chapter 1. Introduction to DCE for

Administrators

The Introduction to OSF DCE introduced you to the OSF Distributed Computing

Environment (DCE), describing the major components of its services. This chapter

provides an overview of DCE from the perspective of the system or network

administrator.

As the Introduction to OSF DCE explains, DCE is a set of services that together make

up a high-level coherent environment for developing and running distributed

applications. These services include a set of tools that support DCE management tasks.

DCE applies techniques that you may have learned from working with applications for

single machines or other distributed systems. These techniques enable system

administrators to manage DCE without having to know about system internals. You can

start with a conﬁguration that is appropriate for your initial needs and grow to larger

conﬁgurations without sacriﬁcing reliability or ﬂexibility. DCE supports large networks

with many users, as well as smaller networks.

The following concepts, which are described in the remaining sections of this chapter,

are central to DCE system administration:

• Clients and servers to make and respond to requests for a service

• Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) for client-to-server communications

• Cells, which are groups of users, servers, and machines that share security,

administrative, and naming boundaries

• A single namespace that lets client applications identify, locate, and manage objects,

including users, machines, servers, groups of servers, and directories

• A single ﬁlespace that allows data sharing among users and machines with proper

authorization

• Principals, which are entities—including users, servers, and computers—that are

capable of communicating securely with other entities

• Access Control Lists (ACLs) to control access to objects

• Caching, which is the technique of using a local copy of information to avoid looking

up the centrally stored information each time it is needed

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