High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The DCE Distributed File System (DCE/DFS) is the remote file access protocol used with the Distributed Computing Environment. It was based on the AFS Version 3.0 protocol that was developed commercially by Transarc Corporation. AFS Version 3.0 was in turn based on the Andrew File System Version 2.0 protocol (also used by the Coda disconnected file system) originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University.