Looking Beyond the Tools
Although you use the task objects to perform various administrative operations, your most important focus is on the elements or entities that you're managing. Each of four task objects provided with DCE enables you to manage a specific element or entity in your DCE cell. The elements are as follows:
A DCE cell
You can test whether a cell is running, show general information about available services in a cell, and back up security and CDS information by using the
cell task object.
Cell name
You can create and manage cell alias names, which are needed for registering a cell in multiple global directory services. These operations use the cellalias
task object.
DCE hosts
You can configure and remove DCE hosts in a cell, show information about hosts in a cell, and start and stop DCE processes on hosts in a cell by using the
host task object.
DCE users
You can add and remove users and show information about users in a DCE cell with the user task object.
The remaining topics in this part discuss how to manage these DCE elements by using the default implementations of the four dcecp task objects provided with DCE.