Summary of the 5th DCE-Workshop in Augsburg, Germany

Summary of the 5 th DCE-Workshop
in Augsburg, Germany
On November 11th and 12th 1999, the 5th German DCE-Workshop
took place in Augsburg, Germany. It focused on exchanging information
and experience as well as on operation strategies for DCE and
DFS.
When the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) was born in the beginning of the nineties
at the Open Software Foundation (OSF), now known as The Open Group, it was of interest for
many computer people. "The Network is the Computer" was the credo. DCE together with the
Distributed File System (DFS) did promise to implement a common, hardware and operating
system independent platform, giving the administrator a homogeneous system view. But soon it
became clear, that the lofty goals of this system had created a beautiful but complicated product.
The result was a long and steep learning curve, time and energy needed to migrate to DCE/DFS
seemed often not feasible. In the meantime, DCE seems to be no real hot topic anymore, rarely we
do see any article in one of the bigger computer magazines.
Nevertheless, the Distributed Computing Environment is used at many places. Not only universities
- which naturally have a very heterogeneous environment - use it, but also the industry did understand
its advantages. Security, availability, scalability and platform-independence in one solution
are properties (which cannot be found in any other solution!) were the reasons for this not publicly
known success. To improve exchange within the German language area, a number of workshops
on DCE/DFS were organized in the past. The 5th workshop took recently place in Augsburg, in
the south of Germany. Around 60 participants, with the exception of a few visitors form Austria
and Sweden all from Germany, made the trip to actively form this two day long event. The talks
and the feedback did show, that DCE/DFS has brought forth a lot of success stories, which are
well worth to be reported. Therefore, there is definitely no reason to hold back with it.
The event started out with a series of short status reports to get a feeling about the situation at the
participating institutions. Escorted by brisk discussions, the reasons for using DCE were explained
and the goals and strategies were outlined. All reports were summed up by the operational numbers:
Number of registered users, amount of data in DFS, the number of client and server systems
and the size of the administrator teams. There is a large variety of installations from a few hundred
users and even fewer machines to a lot over 40,000 registered users and hundreds of workstations
and PCs. For some of the organizations there is simply no alternative to DCE, just because of the
size of the projects and the fact that all somehow competing products do not really scale up that
far. The client systems are extremely heterogeneous almost everywhere and apart from Unix
systems the Microsoft platforms (Windows 3.x/9x/NT), Linux-PCs and MacOS-Systems have to
be supported, too. Gateway solutions allowed to integrate even those systems, which are still missing
a native DCE/DFS implementation. Interesting enough, almost every administrator team was
surprisingly small.
The remaining time of the workshop was spent on specific topic areas. Focusing on "system integration",
Jürgen Hölters, talked about the almost complete list of standard services (sendmail,
IMAP- and POP-Server, Apache Web-Server with Web-applications), which were mad available
using DCE/DFS at Münster University. Daniel Mallman, Research Center Jülich, shared his experiences
with the newly available Kerberos integration of standard Unix r-commands. This is very

interesting since the DCE security-server started to be usable as Key Distribution Center (KDC)
for Kerberos (starting with DCE Version 1.2.2). Ralf Utermann and Markus Zahn, Augsburg University,
talked about the integration of non DCE/DFS aware client platforms and their university's
strategy for Windows, MacOS and Linux platforms and gave an outlook on their special integration
of Linux PCs using a PAM-/NSS-solution, which is nearly completed.
Focusing on "Administrative Delegation", Dieter Mack from Hohenheim University, explained how
one can delegate the administration of DFS servers and nevertheless restrict the rights of the administrators
to their domains, i.e. to their file servers. The talk covered the technical background as
well as step by step instructions to achieve this special setup. Jochen Hollmann, Chalmers University
of Technology, Sweden, presented the Chips project from its motivation up to its technical solution,
how to administrate such a complex system seamlessly. Roland Laifer, University of Karlsruhe,
talked about the gotchas in the business of DCE/DFS troubleshooting, illustrating the participants
how to track down all kinds of problems. Gerhard Rentschler, Stuttgart University, presented
his insights on LDAP and its usability for or together with DCE.
Finally, the workshop focused on DCE/DFS based projects. Stefan Ost, Münster University, started
with an overview of a multi-campus computing project, implemented for the state of "Nordrhein-Westfalen".
The projects aims to establish a super-computing infrastructure using DCE/DFS
as the base technology. Jens Rosenhan, MB&T GmbH, gave interesting insights form his consultant
work, which mainly takes place in the industry. He illustrated, that DCE/DFS is not only used
at universities. Big companies based and still base their strategic decisions on this platform independent
technology.
To draw the conclusions, the numerous interesting talks formed a successful event, which was larded
with lots of discussions. The participants decided to keep in touch even closer. The hope is to
avoid parallel development of similar solutions as well as to exchange
even more insights. All talks are available via the web at
http://www.RZ.Uni-Augsburg.DE/DCE/ws-99/ (most of them in
German only). But we are sure that all authors will answer further questions,
if any. Thanks to all participants for the valuable time. Special
thanks go to the Hohenheim University, where the next workshop will
be hosted in summer 2000. We'll definitely be there, you too?
January 2000, Markus Zahn and Roland Laifer