____________________________________________________ Digital Resource Broker Release Notes November 1996 This document contains information about system and version compatibility, installation information, documentation omissions, and known problems and restrictions in this version of Resource Broker. Revision/Update Information: Digital Resource Broker V2.0 Digital Equipment Corporation Maynard, Massachusetts ________________________________________________________________ November 1996 The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital Equipment Corporation assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. The software described in this document is furnished under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license. No responsibility is assumed for the use or reliability of software on equipment that is not supplied by Digital Equipment Corporation or its affiliated companies. Restricted Rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013. © Digital Equipment Corporation 1996. All Rights Reserved. The following are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation: Alpha AXP, AXP, Bookreader, DEC, DECnet, DECwindows, DEC Fortran, DIGITAL, OpenVMS, VAX, VMS, Digital UNIX, and the DIGITAL logo. PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc. This document was prepared using VAX DOCUMENT Version 2.1. 1 Compatibility Information The following describes operating system and version specific information: o If your workgroup has configured any Replica Server(s), the Replica(s) must be running the same version of Resource Broker as the Master Server. For full functionality of new features, the Master Server and all Replica Server(s) should be running the highest version of Resource Broker. For interoperability with WINDOWS NT, you should upgrade all VMS hosts in the workgroup to run V2.0 of Resource Broker. o Field test versions of Resource Broker are also available for Digital UNIX systems and Windows systems. o For additional information about Resource Broker availability see the DCE Infocenter on the WWW at http://www.digital.com/.i/info/dce/rb_page.htm or contact your Digital sales representative. 2 New Features The following are enhancements to the Resource Broker with this version, and are fully documented in the Guide to the Resource Broker, except as noted: o C and C++ header files and documentation of the Resource Broker API are included. o Support for Windows hosts within the workgroup. And, on Windows systems, access to the Resource Broker API via OLE Automation. Documentation for this feature is provided in the Readme file of the Resource Broker folder after a Windows installation. o Support for Resource Broker on hosts which are not within a DCE cell. The system management utility (rbsetup) now allows multiple methods for locating Resource Broker servers: DCE, NIS, explicit, broadcast. 1 Rbsetup configuration also supports new mechanisms for authentication of the client when performing a server startup: DCE credentials (as in previous versions), use of an explicit account and password, or a check for an .rhosts or host.equiv file (Digital UNIX only). o New security options for rbexec and rbgui which allow specification of remote accounts and passwords for authentication at server startup time. o New service configuration options: - Support for services of type "named". Support for server/detect_type and server/startup_type "none". - Support for server/detect_type of "dcom_class" to allow discovery of distributed COM (DCOM) applications. This feature is only available on Windows systems. - Support for open-network remote procedure servers (ONC RPC). - Support for detection and startup of servers configured with the DCE daemon (dced). This feature is only available on Digital UNIX systems running DCE V2.0. - Support for the server/identifier and server/version attributes for DCE services. - Support for the server/cleanup_interval attribute to specify a time interval for maintaining information about obsolete or unreliable servers. - Support for the server attribute host/name. o New options for the CommandLine Interface (rbexec): - Support for configuration and removal of resources ("-c resource" and "-r resource") - Version identification ("-v -i version") - Ability to read or write service definitions from or to a file ("-f filename") - Formatting changes for the output of inquiry operations 2 - Optional prompting for service and resource attributes during configuration o The rbgui application allows for customization of display fonts. o The DCE application example api_test1 is provided. o A non-DCE example is also provided to demonstrate load- balancing of multiple servers for a simple client/server application (api_test2). 3 Documentation Omissions The following items are not documented in the Guide to the Resource Broker: o ONC support is provided on OpenVMS systems, using the UCX product. The UCX portmapper must be started and actively reporting ports in order to be able to detect ONC servers on OpenVMS. Use the command "UCX show portmapper" to validate that the portmapper reports at least one port in use by the portmapper itself (usually port 111). If the portmapper is not running, the Resource Manager will be delayed by the default timeout value for UCX (typically 25 seconds) every time it queries for a configured ONC service. The portmapper must be running on every OpenVMS system configured as a Resource Broker Resource Manager, if there are ONC services in the service configuration. 4 Known Problems and Restrictions o The Graphical User Interface (rbgui) has no known problems. o Users of the Resource Broker API who are also using IDL with C++ support and wish to register their server in the DCE namespace should not use the register_named_ object method. Instead, a sequence similar to the following should be used to export server bindings: 3 rpc_server_inq_bindings rpc_ep_register rpc_ns_binding_export The register_named_object method cannot be used because it implicitly does a namespace lookup before doing the export; if the namespace entry has already been enabled for resource broker (for example, by doing an rbexec -c entry operation), depending on timing issues, this might cause resource broker to start another instance of the server, which in turn might continue the cycle by doing another namespace lookup, etc. The example application, api_test1, includes a server application built using IDL with C++ support and uses the above set of calls to register the server bindings. o The command line interface request to remove account information ("rbexec -r account") currently removes only the most recent version of the file rb$auth.dat. For compatibility with other platforms, this may be changed in the future such that all versions will be deleted. Your application should not depend on the presence of previous versions of this file after account removal has been requested. o The Resource Manager on a VMS host system, configured to run DCE V1.3B, may terminate after days of operation due to a lack of memory for the DCE runtime. This is because of a DCE memory leak problem associated with the use of many RPC calls. When this problem occurs, you must use the rbsetup utility to restart the Resource Manager. o The default service definition for dce_administration /resource_broker includes a prioritization attribute based on dce/stats/call_rate. For workgroups not configured to use DCE services, this results in a prioritization value of -1, and rbgui and rbexec report the broker as 'unreliable'. Workgroups configured to use DCE do not have this problem. As a workaround, you can remove the prioritization attribute using either rbgui or rbexec. Remember that you must be SYSTEM on the system running the Master Server in order to perform this operation in a workgroup 4 not configured to use DCE services. Here is an example showing the problem and workaround, using rbexec: rbexec -i servers dce_administration/resource_broker Servers: ncacn_ip_tcp:16.31.48.73[4352] (-1) rbexec -v -r service dce_administration/resource_broker prioritization Attribute prioritization removed rbexec -i servers dce_administration/resource_broker Servers: ncacn_ip_tcp:16.31.48.197[1953] (37) o The following are problems or restrictions to the Resource Broker server: - Adding a more restrictive server/detect_template to an existing host service configuration (which had active servers) does not cause a full reevaluation of the servers such that the list of servers becomes more restrictive. To avoid this problem, you must restart the Resource Broker server. - For certain Resource Broker configurations in which there are one or more Resource Broker Replica servers in addition to the required Resource Broker Master Server, there are situations in which the Master and Replica(s) may become partitioned. Under such circumstances, query results may be inconsistent depending upon the particular master or replica server that responds to the query. Typically, this problem can be corrected by issuing the system management utility operation rbsetup restart on each host providing a master or replica server. - If you are configuring a Replica server, the host providing the master must have the subsys/DEC/rb- admin group in its credentials. If not, you must perform these operations on the host providing the master, in order to correct it: - dcesetup clean - dcesetup start 5 - rbsetup restart (required on UNIX and WINDOWS hosts, not necessary on VMS) - Replicas are not supported for broadcast workgroups. 6