Building Internet Firewalls, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. Intermediary Protocols

Earlier we discussed TCP, UDP, and other protocols directly based on IP. Many application protocols are based directly on those protocols, but others use intermediary protocols. Understanding these intermediary protocols is important to understanding the applications that are built on them. This chapter discusses various general-purpose protocols that are used to build numerous applications or higher-level protocols.

We discuss intermediary protocols here because they form the basis for many of the protocols we discuss later. However, intermediary protocols are usually invisible, and they are often complex. If you are not already familiar with network protocols, you may want to skip this chapter initially, and come back to it as needed.

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

The term “RPC”, or remote procedure call, can be used for almost any mechanism that lets a program do something that looks to the programmer like making a simple procedure call but that actually contacts another program. However, it’s also the name of some particular protocols for this purpose, which are extremely widespread.

Multiple remote procedure call protocols are known as RPCs. In particular, on Unix systems, the protocol normally known as “RPC” is one developed by Sun and later standardized as Open Network Computing RPC. On Microsoft systems, the protocol normally known as “RPC” is compatible with a descendent of Sun’s RPC standardized by the Open Systems Foundation (OSF) as part ...