Programming with Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)

Network types (transport selection)

The rpcgen compiler takes optional arguments that allow a programmer to specify a desired network type or even a specific network identifier. (For details about network selection, see ``Remote Procedure Call programming''.)

NOTE: In the context of RPC programming, the term network is frequently used (as here) as a synonym for transport or transport type.

The -s flag creates a server that responds to requests on all transports of a specified type. For example, the invocation

rpcgen -s datagram_n prot.x

writes a server to standard output that responds to any of the connectionless transports specified in the NETPATH environment variable (or in /etc/netconfig, if NETPATH is not defined or does not specify any connectionless transports).

Similarly, the -n flag creates a server that responds only to requests from the transport specified by a single network identifier that must match a network-id in the /etc/netconfig file.

NOTE: Be careful using servers created by rpcgen with the -n flag. Because network identifiers are host-specific, the server produced may not run on other hosts in the expected way.