05/17/95

On May 17th, 1995 the DCE Users Group of Michigan met at the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI). The meeting was sponsored by the Client/Server Exchange, a joint partnership of IBM and the University of Michigan promoting open, client/server computing.

Hosting the meeting was Janani Janakiraman of U-M/CITI. Bob Brandt of the Ford Motor Company kept the minutes. Again, thanks to the "Client/Server Exchange", for keeping the coffee pots filled.

Janani Janakiraman, of CITI, opened the meeting.

The agenda of the meeting was as follows:

* OSF Member Meeting Info - Bob Goldschneider, OSF
* OSF DCE Security SIG Review - Tom Hunwick, EDS
* Dazel Presentation - Gary Mclaughlin, Dazel
* CITI DCE Workshop Info - Mark Carter, UofM/CITI
* OSF Status - Bob Goldschneider, OSF
* Transarc Encina Presentation - David Hart and Dino Chiesa, Transarc

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The next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 6th, 1-4PM.

The proposed agenda is:

* EDS Status and Plans
* IBM's DCE experience at Nationwide Insurance (tentative)
* Presentation from CrossLogic (Visual RPC)
* Janani's experience using Connection/DCE (Open Horizon)

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**********************
* OSF Member Meeting *
**********************

Bob Goldschneider, Director of North American Operations for OSF, spoke about the coming OSF Member meeting being held May 31st thru June 2nd. He has invited representatives from all DCE User groups known to OSF to gather together to interact and exchange ideas on activities in their regions. He thought it would be good for representatives from the individual user groups to have the opportunity to meet each other and potentially coordinate activities. One issue to be discussed would be the need for an umbrella organization.

Through interaction with different user groups, Bob found that a main interest was deployment stories from individual organizations and for vendors to share customer's experiences. It was also discussed that many companies don't like to discuss the details of their DCE architecture due to the fact that it affords them a competitive edge.

Bob Brandt (bbrandt1@ford.com) of Ford Motor Company and John Barclay (JB@is.chrysler.com) of Chrysler will be representing the DCE User's Group of Michigan.

*******************************
* OSF DCE Security SIG Review *
* Tom Hunwick, EDS *
* MSUSTR02.THUNWI01@eds.com *
*******************************

The SIG has four working groups: Security Working Group, Public Key (PK), Single Sign-On (SSO), and Security Strategy (document). These groups were formed in part by interest from end-user input. Smart cards also held a significant interest.

* The Security SIG Co-chairs are Jim Schindler (js@cup.hp.com) and
Charles Blauner (blauner_c@jpmorgan.com).

* Some relevant net addresses follow:
sig-security@osf.org (DCE Security SIG Mail-List),
sig-security-request@osf.org (Requests to the DCE Security SIG Mail-List),
dce-sig-security@osf.org (Security Working Group Mail-List),
http://www.dstc.qut.edu.au/MSU/research_news/osf/index.html (Home Page
for DCE Security SIG)

* The Security SIG meets three times a year. The next meeting is at the end of June.

The Security working group has two parents, DCE SIG and Security SIG. Part of their charter is to maintain the rfc 8.2 and review current security technologies. Tom will make the rfc 8.1 available for review as a basis for input to the rfc 8.2. The working group is soliciting feedback for end-user requirements input to the rfc 8.2. Once this input is gathered, it will be voted on and presented to OSF. As part of the technology review, the working group looked at CDE. The working group was surprised at how little security was in the technology. They were informed that the security of the product would be increased in the future.

The Security Working Group Co-chairs are Tom Hunwick (MSUSTR02.THUNWI01@eds.com) and Gary Gaskell (gaskell@dstc.edu.au).

The Public key working group is chaired by Ellen McDermott, OpenVision. The public-key login will be in DCE 1.2. RFC 68.1 contains further discussion on public-key technology.

The Single Sign-On group is chaired by Maryann Hondo (hondo@apollo.hp.com). A mail-list address pertaining to this discussion is sso.general@hp.apollo.hp.com. You may be able to participate in this list and should address requests to Maryann.

The Single Sign-On group has three goals:

* produce a single signon framework
* produce a summary of sso requirements
* produce a set of technical requirements based on 1 and 2 above

These technical requirements will most likely be added to rfc 8.2 as a separate section.

Question - Does this group address vendor products?
Answer - Vendor products are reviewed to see if they are integrated with DCE. Many vendors are not at all concerned with DCE. It's not a fit for everyone.

Question - Are Database vendors signing on with DCE?
Answer - Most of them appear to be.

Question - Is there a working group for Smart cards?
Answer - Not currently, but there is an rfc that discusses smart cards. [AUTHOR: RFC 57.1 and 71.0 deal specifically with smart cards.]

Question - Are Microsoft efforts undermining DCE?
Answer - Microsoft has taken the spec for RPCs and written their code to that spec. The OSF distributed reference code is compatible.
- Microsoft didn't want to pay the license fees at the time for desktop usage so they wrote their own code. Microsoft has a strategy paper on DCE that is not widely available.

**********************
* Dazel Presentation *
* Gary Mclaughlin *
* 708-236-1780 *
**********************

The Dazel corporation sells a product named DAZEL that performs client/server output management. DAZEL provides a unified infrastructure for the management, access, and delivery of output throughout the enterprise.

* Dazel Inc. is based in Austin, Texas.
* Founded in 1991.
* DAZEL was the first commercial DCE product.

The infrastructure of the DAZEL product breaks down as follows:

Management: DAZEL provides a common application from which MIS can proactively manage and control all aspects of corporate output processes and devices including printing, faxing, and paging.

Access: DAZEL offers users a single system view of output for the identification and utilization of all output devices throughout the enterprise. DAZEL can be accessed by users through a GUI/command-line or applications through an API.

Delivery: Leveraging the existing networking and output infrastructure, DAZEL's electronic package enables remote output to any number of remote destinations and destination types (printing, paging, faxing, emailing) with any number of documents and document types. The electronic package includes delivery guarantees and notification.

* DAZEL can be hosted on Sun Sparc, IBM RS/6000, and HP 9000 servers.
* DAZEL also supports MS-Windows clients (using WinSockets over TCP/IP) and can be accessed by any platform that is capable of sending lpr-based output. DAZEL Express is the Unix and Windows client component. It provides a client interface with icon or API-level access to all devices; output destination browsing by device type, location or attributes; personalized phone books (identifying where and how someone prefers to receive their information); custom profiles; group deliveries; electronic package deliveries (containing dissimilar document and destination types); job tracking; automatic notification; and traditional printer support.

DAZEL's delivery provides centralized management of the printers, faxes, and pagers accessible from DAZEL, manages the completion/verification process, and provides automated transforms that maintain document integrity (to and from data stream transforms for ASCII text, PCL, EBCDIC, Postscript, CCITT group 3, MIF, Asteri*k, and user programmable formats). Delivery provides device-independent spoolers, on-line device reconfiguration, security controls, guaranteed output delivery (including checkpoint recovery, device farming (multiple output devices supporting shared work) and logical profiles for individual clients/client groups).

DAZEL Gateways allows for LPR (Unix-based systems) or Mainframe systems to deliver output directly to DAZEL.

Question - Are services provided for Novell?
Answer - Yes, at the end of June.

Question - What is the schedule for porting to DCE 1.1?
Answer - No idea yet.

Question - What is the current number of customers?
Answer - 20, many others are evaluating right now.

*****************************
* Personal Workshop for *
* DCE System Administrators *
* Mark Carter, UofM/CITI *
* 313-764-5440 *
* cse@citi.umich.edu *
*****************************

The Personal Workshop for DCE System Administrators is a five-day individualized workshop featuring hands-on experience performing essential cell maintenance tasks. Workshop topics are chosen "cafeteria-style" according to the needs of the attendee. Topics with the highest priority are afforded
the most attention, other topics are not selected.

Topic Choices include:

* Component Technologies
* DCE/DFS Essentials
* DCE Cell Plan
* DCE Machines & Roles
* DCE Administrative Interface
* Cell Backup and Restoration
* DCE Version Upgrades
* DCE/DFS Replication
* Establishing Intercell Communication
* Miscellaneous Maintenance Tasks

***********************************
* Open Software Foundation Status *
* Bob Goldschneider, OSF *
* 617-621-8778 *
***********************************

Bob Goldschneider, Director of North American Operations for OSF, spoke about the role of the Open Software Foundation as it stands today.

OSF was founded by the National Cooperative Research act but it's real genesis was the early unix wars. It was primarily an R&D company that supplied source code.

* Interoperability is the key issue.
* Executive sponsorship costs $1 Million, Associate sponsorship costs
$250,000.
* OSF wants joint cooperative research for cost savings. This will
help spread development costs.
* A goal is to form cooperative partnerships between end-users, ISVs,
and system vendors.
* OSF currently employees 200 people in offices across the United
States as well as Brussels and Tokyo.
* Their successes include the reference implementation ->] specification
->] standardization model, the membership, and the technologies:
OSF/1, Motif, DCE, DME.
* Parts of OSF/1 can be found in HP-UX, AIX, and DEC Unix.
* Need for improvement in the financial model, broadening sponsorship,
unification of the open systems industry, and confusion in the roles
of Industry Consortia (X/Open, OMG, COSE, UI).
* OSF management is driven by the board of directors and
end-users/sponsors.

* Members fund the infrastructure for the OSF.
* The Pre-Structured Technology (PST) process allows for sponsors to
directly fund new projects. The Project Sponsors own the product and
any royalties will go to them. Previously the sponsors funded all of
the projects and then were charged royalties from the OSF.
* Other OSF services (consulting, education, etc.) additionally fund
the infrastructure.
* There is a possibility that the Request For Technology (RFT) process
may be re-instated.
* DCE is a software platform. This requires the typical life cycle.

Bob also distributed RFC 63.1 which contained the DCE 1.2 Contents Overview.

Question - Why is DCE continually getting bad press?
Answer - The OSF met with the Meta-group, who had previously been publishing bad press about DCE, and found out that one of their large concerns is the ability of the OSF to hold the sponsors together. Their impression was that the sponsors would fragment and go proprietary.
- IBM has announced very aggressive intentions to support DCE.
- Trade magazines are not always correct, don't take them too seriously.

Question - There is a concern over the PST process allowing proprietary projects.
Answer - Each project requires at least two sponsors and then must be approved by the board.

**************************************
* Transarc Encina Presentation *
* David Hart & Dino Chiesa, Transarc *
* 412-338-4361 *
**************************************

Transarc is headquartered in Pittsburgh and employs 250 people. They were founded in 1989 and were purchased by IBM in 1994. They are maintaining their autonomy from IBM and offer DCE products on a number of Unix platforms.

Transarc stated the following reasons for using Encina:

* Need to extend DCE for mission critical applications.
* DCE alone is insufficient for failure recovery.
* Isolation/synchronization problems can result.

Transarc discussed four typical models that correspond to real-world systems using the Encina Monitor:

The Large Scale Client/Server Model - Systems that use the Encina Monitor to break 2-tiered scalability connectivity barriers inherent with RDBMS-centric architectures.

The Client/Server Infrastructure Model - Systems where the Encina Monitor provides a common, production-quality infrastructure for a company's client/server needs.

The Distributed Mainframe Model - Environments where the Encina Monitor is used to provide a mainframe-style single system image from a loosely-coupled cluster of low cost processors.

The Reliable Workflow Model - Workflow-style systems where the Encina Monitor enables high-reliability asynchronous processing.

To get a copy of the white paper that discusses the models in detail, contact David Hart.

Transarc found that of their customers that had successful deployment of production DCE environments, they all had pretty much followed the same project path. Here is their list of project steps to accomplish a suuccessful
deployment of DCE:

List of 6 Project Steps
--------------------------

1. Business Need/Management Commitment
- Projects that align w/ strategic objectives of company
- Good Business case

2. Architecture Plan (written)
- Do a model before you get started. The model should reflect clients,
servers, network, scalability, performance.

3. Degree of skills and training

4. Good Development Schedule (written)
- Who's doing what, milestones, quality control measures. etc.

5. Written administrative plan
- how to develop infrastructure support for this

6. Deployment Plan
-what scale, rate of deployment, maintenance releases, patches, etc.

Question - What number of customers do you have and what percentage have
deployed DCE?
Answer - About 600 sites of which 300 are Encina sites. 20% will
deploy this year.

Question - Whose product will be bundled with Solaris 2.5?
Answer - Transarc's

If you wish to attend future meetings of the DCE Users Group of Michgan, please call (313) 764-5440 or email
dugm-request@citi.umich.edu
if you plan to attend. We'll provide directions to CITI if you need them at that time.


DCE Users Group of Michigan (DUGM)
Author:
Janani Janakiraman
Revised: 06/18/96
URL: http://www.citi.umich.edu/dugm