OSF DCE Administration Guide--Introduction

Location of Installed DCE Files

maintenance.

The contents of the dcelocal subtree can vary from machine to machine inside a DCE

cell to accommodate and serve speciﬁc conﬁgurations. In addition, every machine must

have local access to certain ﬁles so that each machine can run as a standalone system if

the machine is disconnected or partitioned from the cell. The appropriate ﬁles on DCE

servers that have to be local to the server machine must be stored under dcelocal.

Client-related data ﬁles are stored under dcelocal/etc (static conﬁguration data) and

dcelocal/var/adm (log ﬁles and so forth). All server-speciﬁc data ﬁles are located in the

dcelocal/var/dce-component-name directory.

The default pathname for dcelocal is set to /opt/dcelocal during the conﬁguration

process. This is a ﬁxed pathname. Every machine must have local access to the ﬁles

that are necessary to conﬁgure it, up to activating DFS access in the cell. The

/opt/dcelocal/dce_cf.db ﬁle is the DCE conﬁguration ﬁle containing the name of the

host to be conﬁgured and the cell name. A machine must access this small set of DCE

ﬁles, which is kept on the machine’s local disk, to start up the various DCE components

and for local conﬁguration information and log information.

Because DCE conﬁguration takes place after mounting the local ﬁle systems, none of

these ﬁles has to be available in the root partition.

During DCE conﬁguration, only the executables in dcelocal/bin are reliably available.

Start-up procedures, such as rc scripts, need to address executables through dcelocal/bin

rather than /usr/bin, even if the same ﬁles are believed to be in both directories.

Commands in /usr/bin can be just symbolic links to dcelocal.

The dcelocal subtree is populated and initialized during DCE conﬁguration.

4.3 Conventional UNIX Directories

Some ﬁles and directories used by DCE are accessible in conventional UNIX directories.

These DCE ﬁles and directories need to be accessible in conventional locations so users

can conveniently access frequently used utilities and data, such as idl from the /usr/bin

directory and localtime from the /etc/zoneinfo directory. Header ﬁles are accessible in

/usr/include or in its subdirectory, /usr/include/dce, and libraries, such as libdce.a, are

kept in /usr/lib.

4.4 UNIX Permissions for DCE Subdirectories

All directories in the ﬁle system are created with UNIX permission set to rwxr-xr-x for

user root and group bin. In subsequent conﬁgurations, the DCE Security Service can

deﬁne roles for several administrators (principals or groups). A possible scenario

follows:

• A software administrator who owns the installed software packages and has write

and modify permissions for the entire set of ﬁles included in dcelocal.

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