OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Core Components

Chapter 13. Basic RPC Routine Usage
This chapter introduces a number of basic DCE RPC routines for directory service,
communications, and authentication operations and discusses major usage issues
important for developing DCE RPC applications.
This chapter discusses the following topics:
• Overview of basic runtime routines
• Server initialization tasks
• How clients find servers
13.1 Overview of the RPC Routines
This section summarizes the major concerns of RPC communications, name service
interface (NSI) usage, and authenticated RPCs.
13.1.1 Basic Operations of RPC Communications
The DCE RPC runtime provides the following communications operations for RPC
applications:
• Managing communications for RPC applications
As part of server initialization, a server sets up its communications capabilities by a
series of calls to the RPC runtime. These runtime calls register the server’s RPC
interfaces, tell the RPC runtime what combination of communications protocols to
use for the server, and register the endpoints of the server for each of its interfaces.
After completing these and any other initialization tasks, the server tells the runtime
to begin listening for incoming calls.
• Managing binding information
A variety of communications operations allow servers to access and manipulate
binding information. In addition, a set of communications operations enables
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