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From: joshua@athertn.Atherton.COM (Flame Bait)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: OSF Picks Apollo's NCS for Distributed Computing
Message-ID: <24920@joshua.athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 7 Jun 90 20:10:09 GMT
References: <1990Jun1.180211.3586@idacom.uucp> <1056@fiver.UUCP>
Reply-To: joshua@Atherton.COM (Flame Bait)
Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 33

> = palowoda@fiver.UUCP (Bob Palowoda) 
# = someone else quoting an industry rag

>  My question is can both of them [Sun's and Apollo's RPC systems] coexsist 
>  on the same hardware?

Yes.  I've done it, and so have you, if you run NFS while using Apollo's RPC.
NFS is almost always built on Sun's RPC.

It is for exactly this reason that I believe that standarizing RPC systems 
is like standarizing languages: a good think for a small company to do, an 
OK thing for a large company to do, but a bad think for a bunch of vendors 
to do.  What would people say if OSF announced that C was the standard 
language for programming.   FORTRAN, Pascal, and AWK would not be encouraged...

Like programming languages, different RPC protocols have different strengths
and weaknesses.  Different problems will require different RPC systems; one
size does not fit all.  I do not see what the gain is in having OSF (or UI)
choose one RPC system as "standard".  Why not support all the common RPC
systems?  There are only 2 or 3, they each have special strengths and
weaknesses, and do not interfear with each other.  

>Question, what is the best attribute of NCS that will make NFS users
>change over to it?

I'm not sure that this is the goal.  I think that OSF wants new applications
to be written using NCS.  Furthermore, it may not be possible to implement
NFS over NCS.  The NFS spec requires that servers be stateless, it may not
be possible to do this if your RPC system is storing state.  (That is the
"official word" on why NFS uses Sun RPC/UDP, instead of TCP.) I'm not saying
that stateless file systems are a good thing, either.

Joshua Levy (joshua@atherton.com)