| ## Testing Whether a DCE Host Is Running Because DCE communications often involve several steps before clients communicate with their servers, communication failures can be difficult to diagnose. For instance, a server may not be running on a host or the DCE services may not be currently running, even though the host has been configured into the cell. You can use a server ping operation to test whether a server process is running but, if this fails, you might need a way to see if the DCE host is even accessible through the network. The DCE control program's host ping operation tests whether a host's DCE services are accessible on the network, returning a 1 if it is and a 0 if it isn't accessible. The host ping operation tests for the presence of the remote host's DCE daemon (dced). You can read more about the purpose and use of the dced in the topic entitled Managing DCE Host Services and Host Data. The following example tests whether the dced on host duh is accessible on the network. dcecp> host ping /.:/hosts/duh 1 dcecp> ##