Overview - Managing a DCE Cell
From a cell administrator's point of view, a DCE cell consists of a set of networked services that supports the execution of distributed applications. This simple statement, however, doesn't really say anything about what services are currently available in your cell. In fact, the exact number of DCE servers and their locations differs from cell to cell. Even in the same cell, host and network outages and reconfigurations affect service availability.
Although you could use various service-related dcecp objects to test whether and where services are available in a cell, it would be cumbersome. Instead, the DCE control program provides a cell task object that conveniently lists configured DCE servers and tests whether services are available. It can also back up critical data maintained by the DCE Security Service and CDS.