dce/rpc "client" api

[David Allan Finch]

Sander Striker wrote:

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

ONC/RPC predates DCE by sometime it uses a similar
serialization system but the data is written in
the standard Motorola fashion which almost
all Workstation used at that time. If I remember
correctly DCE came about because the OSF which was
an anti-Sun Unix camp refused to use Sun's ONC
technology.  When they designed DCE they spent
more time thinking about security concerns, something
that Sun added into a later version of ONC.

Programmatically you write in an IDL which you
then generate source to handle the serialisation,
this is similar to just about all the RPC systems
available.

On top of the basic XDR serialization code
is built the ONC/RPC system. This was then
used to build NFS and NIS. ONC is really
NFS & NIS which provides similiar services
as SMB & NMB.

When Novel & MS came to build there own
Networked File & Account Systems*1 I never
understood why they did not use ONC*2 which
Sun had been shipping for sometime. The
other strange thing was that the spec for
ONC was avaiable of free in the public
domain, it only cost if you wished to use
there implementation. Vast amounts
of 'Not Invented Here' back in those early
network days, just like now.

*1 - BTW Network file and print systems where
invented at Imperial (IIRC) and the first version
was added into Unix over night. Sun was the
first company to ship with a rewritten system,
remember Sun started from the lot at Stanfard
that wrote the BSD network stuff.

*2 there where byte swap performance problems
in the early days, but these where not to difficult
to solve, we modified a verion of XDR to auto
convert to the slowest ends perfered format.
X does the same thing in it protocol for the
same reason.

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