Although applications may need some aspect of these host services (control over which services are enabled for a particular server, for example), typical servers do not have to do any special coding for them. This reduces the size and complexity of server code and keeps the details of administration out of applications. It also removes the burden of server administration so you can concentrate on the application's business functionality.
System administrators will appreciate this development model too because it is unlikely that many servers implementing their own administrative mechanisms will all behave in the same manner. Administrators commonly use the DCE control program, dcecp, to access the host services (via dced) of any host in their distributed environment (provided the user has the appropriate permissions). The DCE control program also uses a script language for more sophisticated administration. See the OSF DCE Administration Guide - Core Components for more on using dcecp to access the host services.
Although dcecp commands offer an administrator a great deal of control over DCE hosts and servers, a set of APIs are also supplied for application developers who need to access the DCE host services from an application rather than from scripts or the operating system's command line.
Typical business applications do not use the APIs of these services, but a management application might. A management application is a client or server that manages other servers or some aspect of the distributed environment. (The dced program is itself a management application that is built into DCE.) Some other types of applications that might use these API include
· Applications that control other servers for load balancing or server redundancy.
· An application that uses a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of the command-line interface provided by dcecp.
· An application that needs to monitor a server's current state. For example, an application may need to make sure a particular server or one of its services is available.