If you are planning to use XDS to access the cell namespace in a one-cell environment (that is, your cell does not need to communicate with other DCE cells), you do not need to set up a cell entry in GDS for your cell because the XDS functions simply call the appropriate statically linked CDS routines to access the cell namespace. In these circumstances, XDS always tries to access the local cell when given an untyped (non-X.500) name.
For XDS to be able to access any nonlocal cell namespace, that cell must be registered (that is, have an entry) in the global namespace.
For information on setting up your cell name, see the OSF DCE Administration Guide.