dce/rpc "client" api

[Mayers, Philip J]

ONC/RPC and DCE/RPC are totally different animals, that accomplish the same
purpose. DCE/RPC happens to be the interesting one, since it's what NT uses.
ONC/RPC is used most notably in NFS. I typically turn anything using it off,
since there are mile-wide holes in most Unices handling of ONC/RPC (sun
calendar manager, anyone?).

(That's not to say the same isn't true of DCE/RPC...)

I personally regard a generic, transport independent DCE/RPC library as a
good thing from an engineering point of view. I can envisage OpenExchange,
running on a Linux box. Nice... *But*, from a "here-and-now" point of view,
I can also see it makes sense to go with what you've got.
Samba-the-file-server doesn't need TCP mappings itself AFAIK.

The real shame of it is that two DCE/RPC libraries might end up being
available. If you're using an IDL compiler, which calls the library to
marshall/unmarshall, then the non-Samba library is going to make sense, and
the auto-generated codebases (samba and not-samba) are going to diverge.
That could be costly in the future.

Still, c'est la vie. I imagine at some point, the codebases might converge.
Hopefully the .so architechture will be flexible enough to have it's
front-end replaced at a later date. I'm sure the team knows what it's doing
in that respect.

Regards,
Phil

+----------------------------------+
| Phil Mayers, Network Support     |
| Centre for Computing Services    |
| Imperial College                 |
+----------------------------------+ 

-----Original Message-----
From: Sander Striker [mailto:s.striker at striker.nl]
Sent: 21 August 2000 16:59
To: jeremy at valinux.com
Cc: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton; samba-technical
Subject: RE: dce/rpc "client" api


Jeremy> Such implementations (DCE) on UNIX are quite rare and
Jeremy> not widely used compared with ONC/RPC.

Could you please give me a short insight between the
diffs between ONC/RPC and DCE/RPC? Maybe a pointer
to ONC/RPC?

Luke> how do you propose to implement DCE/RPC over TCP services in the
absence
Luke> of the server providing such services?

Jeremy> People who want to use the Samba DCE code in such
Jeremy> servers will have to write the framework to provide
Jeremy> the complete PDU's to the Samba shared libraries.

Ouch!

Jeremy> I neither know nor care how much work they'll have
Jeremy> to do to implement this.

Point taken, samba only provides for samba...

Jeremy> We're providing the best solution *FOR SAMBA* - not
Jeremy> for anyone else right now. After lots of dicsussion
Jeremy> Andrew suggested the shared library approach for Samba
Jeremy> instead of the separate daemon approach. I'm not going
Jeremy> to re-hash those discussions here - check the mail
Jeremy> archives for details. As technical lead and chief architect
Jeremy> of Samba it is his decision to make, and I concurr with it.

Hmm, why is this last line always needed? This is clear and
I really find this the annoying part (pulling rank) which I
was referring to in response to Lukes announcement.

Jeremy> If you want to write or extract the framework code from
Jeremy> Samba to make DCE/RPC over straight TCP (or even NetWare IPX
Jeremy> if you like) work then go for it - but it isn't the solution
Jeremy> we've decided to use in the main Samba code.

Granted. However, if this code is used to do a proper implementation
of dce/rpc including dce/rpc over smb, there are going to be
conflicts. I mean, a dce/rpc endpointmapper provides easy
extendability to services provided. Samba would need a proprietary
way...

Just my two cents worth,

Sander