HP DCE/9000 (new at 11i original release)

HP Distributed Computing Environment (HP DCE/9000) Version 1.8 provides a high-quality, comprehensive, standards-based framework to develop, administer, and use distributed applications.

Kernel threads application development is now supported on HP-UX. The 32-bit version of the kernel threads DCE library (libdcekt) is now part of HP-UX base operating system. The 64-bit version of libdcekt is also included.




	NOTE: It should be noted that only the DCE library (`libdcekt`) has been ported to 64-bit while the binaries and daemons which are part of the DCE products are still 32-bit. The advantages of moving to 64 bit can be found under `http://www.software.hp.com/STK/hpuxoverview.html#64-Bit`.

The distinction between the International and US/Canada version of DCE components has been removed. That is, the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) which was earlier restricted to US/Canada is now available for all customers. This means there will only be one version of the DCE library and dced daemon which is based on the 56-bit DES version.




	NOTE: The number of LAN interfaces supported by DCED is limited to 32 and the LAN interfaces supported by CDS is 12. If the number of LAN interfaces is more than 32, the environment variable `RPC_SUPPORTED_NETADDRS` can be used to specify the list of 32 LAN interfaces that are used by the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) application.

There are a number of new environment variables that have been added to support Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) operations and to enable better usability:

RPC_PREFERRED_PROTSEQ: This variable is used to set the preferred protocol sequence.
RPC_SUPPORTED_PROTSEQS: This variable helps in restricting the protocol sequence. For example, setting this variable to ncacn_ip_tcp will enable only connection-oriented communication.
RPC_DISABLE_PRIVATE: The datagram protocol opens up one socket for each network address family supported on a host. Once opened, these sockets are kept in a pool for use whenever the process needs to make another RPC over that particular address family. If concurrent calls are made over the same address family, the calls share a single socket from the pool. However, this is inefficient for those applications that don't require this degree of concurrency.
To remedy this situation, along with the usual shared sockets in the socket pool, there are 1 or 2 sockets that are tagged as "private". You can disable this setting by exporting RPC_DISABLE_PRIVATE=1. The default behavior is for private socket to be enabled.
RPC_DISABLE_LOCAL: For a RPC server and client on same host, UNIX domain sockets are used by default to reduce the overhead. This can be disabled by exporting RPC_DISABLE_LOCAL=1.
HPDCE_CLIENT_DISC_TIME: An environment variable provided in the DCE RPC runtime with which the idle association termination time can be tuned to be a lesser value than the architecture-provided value of 5 minutes. With this environment variable, the idle association termination can be tuned to any value in the range of 1 to 300 seconds. Note: This variable is applicable only for connection-oriented protocol.
SCTE_UNCACHE_TIME : This variable is applicable for datagram only and is used to reduce the server connection table (SCT) elements to be uncached sooner than the default value. The default time is 300 seconds. This would allow more SCT entries to be added to the SCT without resulting in cache exhausting heap.
DMS_FORCEON: DCE Measurement Service (DMS) provides performance instrumentation for DCE servers and for the server side of applications that use DCE RPCs. When DMS is enabled, it collects data about RPCs that execute in the target process. The collected data is actually displayed using HP GlancePlus. By default, DMS is disabled. DMS can be enabled exporting DMS_FORCEON=1.

Also, CMA threads are being obsoleted. It is recommended that all applications using CMA threads should start migrating to kernel threads and use libdcekt. See “Kernel Threads vs. CMA Threads” for additional information.

Compatibility Issues

All applications using the 64-bit library libdcekt may need to include /usr/include/dce/dce64.h. The site http://devresource.hp.com/STK contains 64-bit porting concepts and 64-bit compiler and linker changes needed to port the application to 64-bit.

DCE server products are not supported on workstations (Series 700 machines).

HP DCE/9000 (new at 11i original release)

Technical documentation

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Compatibility Issues