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Concluded WG OSF Distributed Computing Environment (dce)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name OSF Distributed Computing Environment
Acronym dce
Area Applications Area (app)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-dce-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chair Douglas Hartman

Final Charter for Working Group

This is only an abstract not a submitted charter - md 6/29/92

This BOF will give IETF attendees an opportunity to learn more about the
OSF organization and the DCE technology. OSF is a cooperative research
and development organization chartered under the National Cooperative
Research Act. OSF has delivered technologies such as the OSF/Motif
graphic user interface and the OSF/1 operating system. OSF's most
recent technology offering, the Distributed Computing Environment, will
be of primary interest to attendees. Since OSF is located in Cambridge,
we expect to have a number of OSF DCE engineers on hand for the BOF.

The OSF DCE provides a full function integrated platform for developing
networked applications. OSF DCE includes both a technology
specification,
available for use by anyone (similar to an RFC), as well as a licensable
implementation of the system in ANSI C for computers using the UNIX
operating system. Many leading computer system manufacturers are
developing implementations of DCE for their computers. Target OS
platforms include OSF/1, AIX, UNIX SVR4, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, VMS,
MVS, as well as others.

DCE provides services above the transport layer for use by applications.
[The DCE implementation is written for the Internet protocol suite, but
can be easily adapted to use OSI transport protocols.] DCE is based on
remote procedure calls, and provides servers and administrative
tools for network credential management, global namespace management,
and a distributed file system. All services are integrated with
threads, use consistent naming and security models, and are designed to
scale to enterprise configurations in heterogeneous environments.

In this BOF, we will provide status to those familiar with OSF and
DCE, and introduce those unfamiliar with OSF and/or DCE to the
current state of our work. We also hope to clarify points which have
sometimes been confused regarding OSF's purpose, methodology and results
to date. OSF's membership now numbers more than 300 organizations which
work with OSF to deliver and enhance our system software offerings.
We hope to work with the IETF community in areas of common interest.
DCE relates to a number of IETF-relevant activities, including
work on Kerberos, X.500, DNS, as well as popular distributed systems
products such as NCS and AFS. We will clarify these relationships
in the BOF.

[OSF's Distributed Management Environment, or DME, will likely be
the subject of a future IETF BOF.]