
224 Implementing NFSv4 in the Enterprise: Planning and Migration Strategies
10.1 An overview of DCE/DFS
DCE and DFS are discrete products. Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
is considered a middleware product and is an architecture on which other
applications can be built. Distributed File Service (DFS) is a DCE-based
application; it cannot be installed or used in the absence of underlying DCE
services. DCE can stand alone, without DFS.
As noted earlier, DCE provides security and authentication services to the DFS
application. It also provides the base remote procedure call (RPC) environment,
time synchronization, directory services, auditing, ...