As expected (CI No 1,919), Sun Microsystems Inc, via its SunSoft Inc software subsidiary, has bowed to the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, DCE, which it will henceforth support under Solaris 2.0, its forthcoming Unix System V.4 implementation, via Solaris Federated Services. The services are a collection of interface technologies that enable third party networking products to plug into Solaris 2.0 running on Sparc RISC and the Intel Corp iAPX-86 systems it will also support. As well as DCE, Novell Inc NetWare and Open Systems Interconnection products will also be able to run under Solaris 2.0 using the services. In addition, SunSoft has revamped its own networking environment, Open Network Computing, which is based on a set of remote procedure call protocols that are very different to those found in DCE. ONC+ has new naming, filing, distributed application and security services, and is claimed to be backward-compatible with existing Open Network Computing implementations. It includes a multi-threaded Network File System, NIS+ naming service, a transport-independent remote procedure call for network-independent distributed applications and Kerberos and Digital Equipment Corp support for enhanced network security. Local disk caching, connection-oriented protocol support for access to Network File System servers over low-speed links and RSA for increased security and authentification will be added to Solaris in 1993. The Federated Services interfaces won’t be around until early next year, but SunSoft is offering some demonstration technology which will be available for Solaris 2.0 next month. SunSoft will license ONC+ to all comers – the first component of the new Open Network Computing, NIS+, will ship to third parties by year-end with the others to follow. Prices will be announced by the end of the third quarter.
