CVS update: tng/source/passdb

[Richard Sharpe]

David Allan Finch wrote:

>Richard Sharpe wrote:
>
>>Hmmm, I think you need to tell us what you think an RPC protocol is?
>>
>
>An API which is design to make a remote resource look
>like a local one.
>
Hmmm, I think that this is far too broadbrushed anb approach. An in any 
case, an API is not an RPC protocol.

An API can be extended to provide access to remote objects transparently 
in a couple of ways. One is to use RPC, another is to build a protocol 
that allows each of the operations to be sent over the wire. SMB is 
pretty much like the latter. After a while MS and the others who worked 
on SMB got pretty sick of adding new SMB types whenever they needed to 
do something more, so they started adding transact and transact2 calls. 
However, they got pretty sick of that too, and added RPC on top.

A hallmark, I think, of an RPC system is that you don't have to add more 
protocol types (SMBs) to extend access to more objects/functions on the 
remote system, you simply add more definitions to your IDL file and 
re-compile.

I contend that SMB is not (an) RPC (protocol), it is simply a remote 
access protocol. MS have, however, used SMB as a transport for their RPC 
mechanism, which is DCE/RPC.

>-- 
>Richard Sharpe, rsharpe at ns.aus.com, LPIC-1
>www.samba.org, www.ethereal.com, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba 
>in 24 Hours, Special Edition, Using Samba
>