The Cell
The cell is the basic unit of administration in DCE. A cell usually consists of users, machines, and resources that share a common purpose and a greater level of trust with each other than with users, machines, and resources outside of the cell. Members of a cell are usually located in a common geographic area, but they can also be located in different buildings, different cities, or even different countries, provided they are adequately connected. A cell's size can range from only one machine to several thousand, depending on the size of the organization. All machines in an organization can be included in one cell, or you can choose to have numerous cells within one organization.
Cells designate security, administrative, and naming boundaries for users and resources. Each cell has a name. Cell names are established during the installation and configuration of DCE components.
Members of an organization who are working on the same project are likely to belong to the same cell. For example, in a large organization with several cells, the sales team could belong to one cell, the engineers working on Project X could belong to a second cell, and the engineers working on Project Y could belong to a third cell. On the other hand, a small organization may have only one cell for both the sales force and the engineers because they share the same level of security and the organization's small size does not warrant the additional administrative overhead that maintaining additional cells requires.
DCE services are managed within the context of a cell, as described by the following examples:
· Each DCE cell typically consists of at least one Cell Directory Service (CDS) server, three Distributed Time Service (DTS) servers, and one Security Service server, as well as the databases that the CDS and Security servers use.
· Path names of DCE objects managed by DCE services can be expressed relative to the cell where the objects reside.
· DTS has both local and global servers. Local servers operate within a Local Area Network (LAN). Global servers provide time services anywhere within the cell.