Interoperability and Compatibility

Binary Compatibility with Previous HP DCE Releases

HP DCE 1.6 supports binary compatibility with HP DCE 1.2.1 and later releases. Applications linked with the archived HP DCE 1.2, 1.2.1, and 1.3.1 libdce are fully compatible with applications built with HP DCE 1.6 libraries. These applications can share login contexts and credentials without loss of data.

In HP DCE 1.6 the DCE_SVC_DEBUG macro was changed to acquire a SVC mutex lock (in earlier releases, this took place in the serviceability library). As a result, HP DCE 1.5 applications that use the DCE_SVC_DEBUG macro are not binary compatible with HP DCE 1.6 applications. To enable binary compatibility, the HP DCE 1.5 applications must be recompiled with HP DCE 1.6 running on the HP-UX 10.30 operating system.

Binary compatibility for statically-linked HP DCE 1.2, 1.2.1, and 1.3.1 applications can be disabled, resulting in minor performance gains and slightly smaller credentials files. By default, binary compatibility is enabled when HP DCE 1.6 is installed and configured. You may disable binary compatibility on a per-host basis with the following commands:

#ps -ef|grep dced
#kill <dced PID#>
#/opt/dce/sbin/dced -r
#ps -ef|grep dced
#kill -SIGUSR1 <dced pid#>
#dcecp -local
dcecp> acl mod hostdata -change 
{user hosts/$HOST/self criI} -local
dcecp> acl mod hostdata -io -change 
{users hosts/$HOST/self cdprw} -local
dcecp> quit
#kill -SIGUSR1 <dced pid#>
dcecp>
dcecp> hostvar set -secbinarycompat off

To enable binary compatibility after it has been disabled, do the following:

For information about the U.S./Canada version of HP DCE, see the
HP DCE/9000 Version 1.6 U.S./Canda Version Release Note.

Source Code Compatibility with Previous HP DCE Releases

There are no known source code incompatibilities between HP DCE 1.6 and previous releases.

Interoperability with Other Implementations of OSF DCE

This release has been tested to ensure interoperability with the implementations of OSF DCE on the platforms listed in Table Table 1-1 “HP DCE Interoperability With Other Platforms and DCE Implementations”:

Hewlett-Packard's DCE configuration tools are not guaranteed to interoperate with other vendor's DCE implementations. In particular:

Interoperability of the DES and DES-Hidden Versions

The DES and DES-hidden versions of this release are interoperable with the following limitation: DES-based application servers or clients that specify the "privacy" RPC data protection level or the gss_seal "confidentiality requested" flag are not interoperable with servers or clients based on the DES-hidden version.

Neither DES nor DES-hidden versions of DCE are interoperable with any DCE version that has been built with the DES code omitted (instead of hidden). Some DCE ports from other vendors were built in this way in order to meet U.S. export requirements. If you are running a DCE port from another vendor, check with that vendor for details.

Kerberos Authentication Protocol Compatibility

The DCE Security authentication service implements Kerberos Version 5. DCE Security does not provide backward compatibility support for Kerberos Version 4.