[OpenAFS-devel] [FYI] Review of http://k5wiki.kerberos.org/wiki/Projects/Disable_DES ending February 13, 2009

[Jim Doyle]

Sorry for being such a silent lurker on things I was once very active in :)
Nice to see everyone again. :)

The DCE Security Server used a snapshot of a late Beta release of MIT KRB5.
This was maybe 1996 timeframe.  That said, its features were limited to KDC functionality. DCE did not implement V4 compatibility, nor did it implement the Kadmin Interface. So, any DCE cells still "out there" are
using very old feature set only KDC functionality.
 
> I can see some renewed interest in DCE, particularly if, say, IBM were 
> to opensource Encina, or something like that.

I dont.  It's been over for a long time. Encina open source might have
been interesting 10 years ago as a strategic move. Too late.

Everything I once admired in Encina I now can do with EJB 3, or, need be, EJB 2.1. Need durable message queues with transactional semantics, need it to be cross platform and cross-runtime?  Apache ActiveMQ,  or even JBoss Message Queueing.   I build distributed systems all the time now - with business logic servers running on multiple EJB containers,  distributed transactions that span app server domains and databases using XA, and thin-clients that are transactionally aware. I can authenticate clients to servers with SSL keystores. And it's all FREE... It's called Java Enterprise Edition.  Transaction processing semantics is now as routine as anything else. 

Nonetheless, the DCE opened up the architectural foundation for the J2EE.
In fact, one of the Founders of JBoss was once a coworker of mine at Open Environment Corporation. :)

-- Jim