RFC 1050 (rfc1050) - Page 1 of 24

RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol specification

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Network Working Group                             Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Request for Comments: 1050                        April 1988



                       RPC: Remote Procedure Call
                         Protocol Specification

STATUS OF THIS MEMO

   This RFC describes a standard that Sun Microsystems and others are
   using and is one we wish to propose for the Internet's consideration.
   This memo is not an Internet standard at this time.  Distribution of
   this memo is unlimited.

1. INTRODUCTION

   This document specifies a message protocol used in implementing Sun's
   Remote Procedure Call (RPC) package.  The message protocol is
   specified with the eXternal Data Representation (XDR) language [9].
   This document assumes that the reader is familiar with XDR.  It does
   not attempt to justify RPC or its uses.  The paper by Birrell and
   Nelson [1] is recommended as an excellent background to and
   justification of RPC.

2. TERMINOLOGY

   This document discusses servers, services, programs, procedures,
   clients, and versions.  A server is a piece of software where network
   services are implemented.  A network service is a collection of one
   or more remote programs.  A remote program implements one or more
   remote procedures; the procedures, their parameters, and results are
   documented in the specific program's protocol specification (see
   Appendix A for an example).  Network clients are pieces of software
   that initiate remote procedure calls to services.  A server may
   support more than one version of a remote program in order to be
   forward compatible with changing protocols.

   For example, a network file service may be composed of two programs.
   One program may deal with high-level applications such as file system
   access control and locking.  The other may deal with low-level file
   IO and have procedures like "read" and "write".  A client machine of
   the network file service would call the procedures associated with
   the two programs of the service on behalf of some user on the client
   machine.






Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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