Getting (mostly incompatible) Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment implementations talking to each other and providing software to make DCE’s command-line-based tools easier to use is becoming all the rage. Hewlett-Packard Co recently unveiled a more friendly front-end to DCE – and now HaL Computer Systems Inc’s Austin, Texas-based HaL Software Systems has a new set of graphical administration tools for DCE that run under Motif. HaL, now a Fujitsu Ltd subsidiary, says DCE Cell Manager Tools enables administrators to manage distributed networks centrally because it spans the range of DCE administration facilities and combines their functions into a single tool set. The set includes Namespace Manager, for viewing, searching and editing cell directory namespaces; Configuration Manager, to verify the status of nodes in a DCE cell and perform operations on hosts; and User and Group Security Manager, which enables the DCE security registry to be maintained. HaL says the tools are the first of a planned series of DCE applications and can be used with DCE 1.0.x on SunOS and Solaris from the end of next quarter – on AIX and other systems from the fourth quarter. Two versions are available: DCE Manager Lite is targeted at development environments with cells of 10 clients or fewer and is $5,000 per copy. Cell Manager is for production environments and costs $15,000 per copy.
