Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!amazon.llnl.gov!oberman From: oberman@amazon.llnl.gov Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Are sockets the wave of the future? Message-ID: <1990Aug27.111656.1@amazon.llnl.gov> Date: 27 Aug 90 18:16:56 GMT References: <9008242107.AA19843@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV Lines: 47 In article , page@Eng.Sun.COM (Bob Page) writes: > What does proprietary mean to you? The RPC/XDR specs have been > published for some time as RFCs 1057 (RPC) and 1014 (XDR). RPC/XDR > source code (from Sun) is available for ftp from many places, like > titan.rice.edu. A freely redistributable NFS implementation was built > (not by Sun, but by members of the Internet community) on top of the > RPC/XDR source code. Some vendors have products based on the source. *Sigh* This one depends on your definition of "proprietary". I once was bashed for saying that DECnet is not proprietary. It's specs have been published and are freely available. There are several implementations. But DEC owns DECnet and, until SUN places RPC in the pulic domain, SUN owns RPC. It's implementations are many and on many systems, but it is still owned by Sun. Frankly, this is a bogus issue and I should not have raised it. >> We've already seen a bit of this attitude in the Sun network management >> software. It supports access only by RPC, not SNMP. > > Whoa -- Reality check. Last October at Interop '89, a Sun workstation > running SunNet Manager was in the ACE (now Interop Inc) booth > monitoring _all_ the network gateways (cisco, SynOptics, Proteon, > etc). A number of vendors (SynOptics, Cabletron, Network General, > Xyplex, and more) were running SunNet Manager in their respective > booths to show how they interoperated with the product. The package > was also running in the show's SNMP Interoperability booth. All this > communication was done via SNMP, not RPC. Sorry, but you're wrong. The SunNet Manager recieves SNMP from all of the various sources. But I have another SNMP manager. (Several, in fact.) And guess what? I can monitor my routers (Wellfleet, cisco, Proteon) and my VMS systems. But not Suns. Why? Sun does not have an SNMP agent. When I complained to my Sun salesbeing I was told that I didn't need one. SunNet Manager accesses the data from Suns by RPC. The problem is that I don't want SunNet Manager. I personally prefer others. But the bottom line is that both streams and sockets are much more "portable" than RPC (at least for now). >>> Disclaimer: Don't take this too seriously. I just like to improve my typing >>> and probably don't really know anything useful about anything. >> >> Sounds like good advice. That's why it's there. Kevin