[80] in Open-Software-Foundation-News
Minutes of DCE Deployment Working Group
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tennent (206) 865-3613)
Tue Nov 8 16:49:08 1994
Resent-From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Resent-To: osf-news-mtg@menelaus.LOCAL
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 94 10:07:39 PST
From: Richard Tennent (206) 865-3613 <tennent@espresso.rt.cs.boeing.com>
To: sig-dce-deployment@osf.org, sig-dce@osf.org
The DCE Deployment Working Group met Tuesday, November 1, 1994.
The agenda provided presentations by Household Finance, Hughes
Information Systems and Gradient. The remainder of the meeting was
taken up by a discussion of the need to begin to capture the user
requirements for distributed computing.
The Household Fiance presentation was given by Lou Marzinelli,
Consultant - Business Systems, Research & Technology. The presentation
covered many different aspects of their study of DCE. The
following are some of the points presented:
o DCE and Open Systems - DCE is middleware; goal is transparent
access to anything, anywhere; "Open Systems" can include the
mainframe
o R&D DCE objectives - learn to install; provide internal
documentation
o R&D Cell Configuration - HP-UX, AIX, SunOS, OS/2, Windows on a
single LAN segment
o Administration Tools - very immature; lack consistency
o DCE Application Tools - looking at Gradient's Visual DCE,
OEC's Encompass & HP's OODCE
o DCE MVS Concern - Does MVS DCE convert RPC to LU 6.2
[The conversion is to LU 6.1 to support IMS 3.x. - RCT]
o DCE will continue to push on; Year of 1995 will determine the
future of DCE
Laks Prabhala gave an overview of the project that Hughes Information
Systems is managing for NASA Goddard. Laks had good pictures that
described their environment but I'm unable to include in this report.
o DCE Pilot - 4 cells, 20 systems in largest cell; HP, Sun,
Convex, Cray, IBM and Silicon Graphics systems; no replication
of services; monitoring DCE using HP's OpenView; using
extensible SNMP traps
o POSIX compliance standards based solutions
o Want DCE multiple security services [I may have not captured
this completely enough - RCT]
o Receiving 7 to 8 terabytes/day from satellites and probes
o Using OODCE, HP OpenView - Network Node Manager, Clearcase
(configuration management) & OMT
o REQUIREMENTS
- Async guaranteed non-blocking RPC/messaging
- Event Services: API to initiate an event; filtering to
history logging; dispatching to multiple locations;
corrective action/triggers
- Multi-casting
o Prototypes being worked on - Trader (attributes about what
server provides, e.g., physical location of printer, rated
print speed); distributed applications (DCE pipes vs ftp);
security ACL manager; GUI tool for rgy_edit; rpc broadcast
maybe
The Gradient presentation was given by Tom Cocks. The highlights
of Tom's presentation are:
o PC-DCE/32 is a native port of OSF's DCE source code to Win32;
based on release 1.0.3; supports both client and server
functionality for Windows NT; DCE applications will have
binary compatibility between NT and Windows 95
o DCE core runtime - threads, client side DCE daemons, transports
(TCP/IP and SPX/IPX), naming (CDS clerk as DLL), security with
integrated login
o Security Server for NT - does not supplant NT security services
o Schedule - pre-beta now, beta 4Q94, General Availability 2Q95
REQUIREMENTS
A discussion was held about requirements that were mentioned during
presentations on the previous days of the SIG. Suggested
requirements that needed to be documented were: Async messaging,
support for SNMP v2, Interface Definitions Language (IDL) for the
DCEized database management systems, support for Microsoft COM
extensions for IDL, event services, licensing services and
distributed print services.
Laks Prabhala (e-mail: laks@eos.hitc.com) agreed to be the focal
point for creating the Async Messaging requirement. Any user having
requirements should use e-mail to send ideas to Laks.
For Event Services and Distributed Print Services, Dick Tennent
agreed to distribute to the SIG the X/Open Requirements documents on
these subjects.
Thanks, Dick Tennent
