The Computing Facilities Branch, the Communications Technology Section of the Personal Computing Branch, and the Scientific Computing Resource Center will collaborate on developing a successor to the Advanced Laboratory Workstation (ALW) system based on the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), and will also devise and carry out a plan for migrating the ALW system to its DCE successor. Migration to DGE is necessary because DCE, as an emerging de facto industry standard, will eventually supersede the AFS distributed file system upon which the current ALW system is based. Also, DCE will allow us to extend ALW distributed systems technology to the PC, Macintosh, and the Convex and IBM mainframes, thereby advancing DCRT's strategic plan to provide interoperability among these systems. In FY94, we set up the hardware and software needed for a small DCE test cell, running DCE core services only (no distributed file system). We played a prominent role in architectural management activities, contributing to the Architectural Management Staff (AMS) retreat, facilitated by the Gartner Group and the AMS NOS and E-mail subcommittees. We successfully conducted a beta test of netatalk, a free software package developed at the University of Michigan, which enables Apple Macintosh computers to access AFS files. However, security and performance need to be improved before we release it for production use. We have begun a partnership with UniPress Software, Inc., to add support for AFS to their LAN-Manager for UNIX (LMU) product. If successful, this will enable PCs running DOS and Windows to access AFS files. We have verified that LMU can already read and write AFS files, but that it does not perform authentication. We have developed an interface specification between the LMU server and an AFS authentication library, which we will implement. We received two DCE-based software products: Encina, a distributed transaction monitoring system that can provide connectivity between DOS Windows and UNIX clients and DB2 running under MVS, and DAZEL, a distributed document delivery system. We have not had sufficient staff time to install Encina, which is an extremely complex system. We have installed DAZEL, but have not yet gotten it to work satisfactorily--it is still an immature, overpriced product. We assisted the newly formed Customer Services Branch (CSB) this year in setting up UNIX servers for an electronic Help Desk support system.
