🚀 go-pugleaf

My main question is: who supports DCE RPC now?  And for the other
players, when?  So I know Window NT does -- I have played with it --
and I guess OSF/1 which DEC supports should.  But will IBM support it
for its mainframes and on what: VM/GCS?  Any wild ideas are appreciazted.

As for my experience with DCE RPC on Windows NT, it seems to be a
reasonable implementation of the RPC paradigm, as I understand it from
reading Power Programming and RPC and some other less useful books.
Not that I don't have gripes.  I would like to be able to control the
various queues with my own service discipline, or at least not without
altering the stub code.  An example would be to allow asynchronous
calls and other less generic calling protocols.  Of course, ONC RPC
has a rather simple way of supporting an asynchronous protocol  --
zero timeouts -- but could those fail on a machine with both client
and server on the same machine?  DCE RPC, on the other hand disallows
this trickery by making a zero timeout something else: a qualitative
minimum time that a response should take.  The attitude that DCE RPC
takes is either you are going to spin a thread off to call a long
running RPC routine or you are going to break it up into two and spin
to find when the results are ready.  I am sure it is indeed for the
best ;-).

In the article in Microsoft Systems Journal about the NT architecture,
Helen Custer (?) mentioned that the client-server support for local
(same machine, different address space) RPC is optimized by thread
pairing between the client/server.  Does MIDL/ACF support this with
the localrpc protocol, currently so well-documented ;-)?

BTW, am I right in thinking that OSF is some secret society?  I bike
by their place all the time in Cambridge -- and strangely I never hear
of them doing anything except in the pages of ComputerWorld and PC
Week and the Burton Group.  Nor is there a great abundance of postings
in comp.unix.osf.  Do I have to be on some mailing list?

Thanks.

-- Jim

jbaker@husc.harvard.edu (forwarded to ...)
jimb@kenan.com