Planning and Configuring HP DCE 1.7

5-2 Planning and Conﬁguring HP DCE 1.7

Conﬁguring HP DCE Cells

Choosing a Cell Conﬁguration Tool

HP DCE/9000 offers two cell conﬁguration tools: a script-based tool,

dce_conﬁg, and a SAM-based tool, DCM (DCE Conﬁguration Manager).

SAM (System Administration Manager) is an HP-UX menu-driven

system administration program that includes several other system

administration utilities, in addition to the DCE cell conﬁguration

component.

DCM and dce_conﬁg

DCM is essentially a graphical front-end to dce_conﬁg. However, in

addition to the ease-of-use that a graphical interface confers, DCM has

some important functional differences that offer advantages over

running dce_conﬁg. Therefore, we recommend that you use DCM, and

not dce_conﬁg, to conﬁgure cells in almost all cases. (See “Limitations

of DCM,” the next subsection, for further details.)

Advantages of DCM

Some of the advantages of DCM are:

• DCM has a template mode that allows you to create prototype

conﬁgurations that can be tested before actually creating them.

• DCM checks systems before performing the conﬁguration.

• DCM prevents you from creating an invalid conﬁguration.

• DCM allows you to conﬁgure all HP DCE/9000 Version 1.2, 1.2.1,

1.3.1, 1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 systems in your cell remotely,

from a single administrative node. However, DCM does not conﬁgure

and may not discover all aspects of other vendors’ system

conﬁguration.

• DCM remembers the last successful conﬁguration. This information

is used only when the cell is “down” or critical DCE servers are not

running.

• DCM includes complete online documentation.