Projects : DCE : Experience

U-M's Experience With the OSF's DCE

• Beta site for DCE 1.0.1 code in Jan 92
• Ported DCE to
  • AIX/ESA (core services)
  • MVS (DFS)
  • MAC (core services)
• Set up production cell in Jan 94
• Client/Server Exchange Program (Jan 94)
• Education programs
• DCE related tech reports
• DCE utilities developed
• Developed DCE-based demo programs
• Involvement with OSF

Strategic Direction

The University intends to use DCE as a key piece of its strategy to achieve interoperability across a heterogeneous environment. The first DCE service up will be Security. We hope to have RPC-based applications running next year. We also intend to start rolling out DFS next year.

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DCE Users Group of Michigan

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DCE Production Cell

• Used by CITI staff
• 30 users, 35 machines
• Servers: RS/6000 (IBM DCE 1.3 code)
• Clients: RS/6000, Sun, HP, PC (windows, windows NT, OS/2)
• Regular backups done
• Intercell communication through DNS
• DFS used extensively
  • User home directories
  • Used for large builds
  • 5 Gig disk space
  • 2 file server machines
• Looking at security and CDS replication
• Testing OSF DCE 1.1 code

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Client/Server Exchange Program

• Partnership between CITI and IBM from 1993-96
• Services Provided:
  • Customized training and briefings on client/server computing
  • Multivendor interoperability lab for prototyping solutions
  • Help for customers in building pilot applications

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Education Programs

(contact: info@citi.umich.edu)

• CITI Projects Showcase
• Business Case for Client/Server Computing
• Planning a Client/Server Implementation
• Getting Stated With DCE
• DCE Features and Functionality (based on OSF)
• DCE Applications Programming (based on OSF)
• DCE System Administration (based on OSF)
• DCE Internals (based on OSF)

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DCE-Related Tech Reports

• 95-1 Adamson, A., Rees, J., and Honeyman, P., "Joining Security Realms: A Single Login for Netware and Kerberos", February 1995.
• 95-2 Khandker, M.A., Honeyman, P., and Teorey, T.J., "Performance of DCE RPC", January 1995.
• 95-4 Blumson, S., Carter, M., and Hyde, D., "Automatic Insertion of Performance Instrumentation for Distributed Applications", February 1995.
• 94-1 Carter, M., "Adding 50,200 Users to a DCE Registry: A comparison of OSF DCE V1.0.2 and IBM DCE/6000 V1.2", February 1994
• 94-2 Lever, C., "Using DCS without DCE/LFS", January 1994.
• 93-4 Howe, J., "an Environment for 'Sniffing' DCE-RPC Traffic", June 1993.
• CITI Tech reports are available electronically vis AFS and by anonymous FTP to "citi.umich.edu", directory: /afs/umich.edu/group/itd/citi/public/techreports.
• Online copies of the Tech reports.

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DCE Utilities Developed

• DCE-ized tools: xlock, console/telnet login, ftpd.
• DCESuitcase - a collection of tools (shell scripts) for installing, configuring, administering, and living with DCE and DFS.
• DFS Test Tools - extensions to Expect (TCP based tool) to talk directly to a DFS file server to perform operations as getting a fid for a file, opening the file and reading its contents.

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DCE-Based Demo Programs

• Demographics Demonstration Program (DDP)
• Data Access with DCE (DAD) - access to RDBMS
• DCE Web
• Secure Web Access to Legacy Data
• Accessing Student Records (Mandarin)
• Big Ten Project (sharing transcripts)

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DCE Application Tools

• Visual DCE (Gradient)
• Connection/DCE (Open Horizon)
• Entera (Open Environment Corporation)
• DATE (Bull)
• EOS (Ellery Systems, Inc.)
• Encina (Transarc)
• OODCE (Hewlett-Packard)

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Involvement with OSF

• Ted Hanss - Director, CITI - Chairman of the OSF End User Steering Committee
• Sarr Blumson - Senior SRP, Information Technology Division - co-author of DCE RFC 33
• Technical participation in DCE SIG, Security SIG.