Tools for the New Users of DCE

This article appeared in Vol. 2, Issue I of The DCE Newsletter, published by Open Horizon, Inc.

As DCE moves into the future, it also moves out of the laboratory and into production cells. The new users of DCE are system administrators, not system programmers. These new users are not primarily interested in the intricate depths of DCE. They simply want another useful tool in their administrative kit, one that will make the data and applications used by their network customers accessible and secure across multiple platforms. These new users are concerned with speed and ease in managing DCE, because it is only one of their many tasks.

The shift to production requires a shift in the mode of interaction between DCE cell administrators and DCE technology. Command-line interfaces with their multiple syntaxes, even the new interactive dcecp, are adequate for small development cells. As production cells grow to dozens, even hundreds, of heterogeneous hosts with hundreds of resources to manage, higher level interfaces are needed. These interfaces to the complexity of the DCE command structure decrease both an administrator's learning curve and daily task-completion time:

• Graphical displays to identify object types and reveal the relationships and hierarchy of cell resources
• A point-and-click paradigm and use of color and reverse video to make target selection easy and obvious
• Search capability to specify suitable targets
• Multiple targeting to implement changes faster than repetitive command-line composition
• Task-oriented menus to display appropriate options for selected target(s)
• Integrated subcommands to speed up the administrator's task completion
• Customizable displays to provide critical and peripheral information on status
• On-line help, both QuickHelp cues and procedural help cards, to aid task completion

Just these enhancements to interaction between cell administrators and the DCE command structure can decrease task-completion time. To increase efficiency further, cell administrators need greater remote management capabilities beyond those provided by DCE, such as:

• Secure administration of remote hosts to provide centralized management
• Automated status polling at a user-defined interval and results displayed in color-coded icons to monitor mission-critical hosts
• Automated clearinghouse backup to simplify making reference copies of the CDS namespace
• Capability to determine whether a specific RPC server is available to handle client requests
• Secure context to launch additional applications, utilities, and scripts from a single button bar
• Simplified portability to reduce dependence on underlying, vendor-specific DCE libraries

DCE Cell Manager provides all the capabilities listed here. Without learning the full range of the DCE command and subcommand syntax, a system administrator moves quickly from installation to host client configuration and operation on a variety of platforms that include Sun Sparc, IBM RS6000, DEC AXP, HP 9000 and operating systems that include SunOS 4.1.x, Solaris 2.3, IBM AIX 3.2.5+, HP-UX 9.x, OSF/1 V2.0+.

The future of DCE cell management depends on making the command structure more accessible and providing secure centralized management for heterogeneous environments. DCE Cell Manager meets the needs of the future today.

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