PreviousNext

DCE RPC Administration

A few administrative tasks must be performed when running a distributed application using RPC. The application server executes most of these tasks when it first starts. As described in the previous section, the server registers its (dynamically assigned) listening endpoint with dced. The server also advertises information about itself and the interfaces it supports in the DCE Directory Service.

Nonautomated RPC administration is minimal. The administrator must ensure that each DCE machine has a DCE host daemon running on it. An administrator may be involved in registering servers in the namespace, but this can also be done from server code upon initialization as just described. Usually, an administrator will be needed to change the ACL on the directory where the server will register so that the server has write permission. A management program, dcecp, allows an administrator to (among many things) control the dced and administer RPC information in the namespace.

An administrator may be involved in installing a new RPC-based application. In particular, the server side of the application must be started before it can begin receiving and servicing requests. The administrator may arrange for the server process to be started each time the machine is booted, for example.