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Registering in Multiple Global Directory Services

You can make your cell resources available to users or applications in other DCE cells by registering your cell in a global directory service such as DNS (Domain Name System) or GDS (an X.500 global directory service). Once your cell is registered, users in remote cells can access your cell's resources (provided they have the necessary permissions) by using global names. The following example shows a global DNS name identifying an ASCII line printer in a cell managed by the fictitious Goodco company.

/.../sales.goodco.com/subsys/bldg6/resources/floor2/printer_ascii

But let's say you also want to register your cell in GDS so that foreign cells that have access to only an X.500 global directory service can access your cells resources. Now, your cell needs a second X.500-style name and, for this, you must establish an alias like the following:

/.../C=us/O=goodco/OU=sales

Use a cellalias create operation to create a second name for your cell. This operation creates a new cell principal in the registry service and performs a registry verify operation to ensure that all the replicas are up-to-date. Next it creates a cell alias name in CDS by using the cdsalias object. Finally it performs a hostdata operation on each host in the cell, updating each dcelocal/dce_cf.db file and dcelocal/etc/security/pe_site file with the cell alias name. This last step can take a long time to complete in a cell with many hosts.

The following example creates a new cell alias name /.../C=us/O=goodco/OU=sales.

dcecp> cellalias create /.../C=us/O=goodco/OU=sales

dcecp>

Once you have completed this operation, you can register your cell name with the authority responsible for the particular global service.