Transport Interfaces Programming Guide

Network Services in the Solaris Environment

The Solaris environment provides a large number of networking services based upon the Internet protocol suite (also loosely referred to as the TCP/IP protocol suite, described on "TCP/IP Internet Protocol Suite"). These services are listed in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1 TCP/IP Services


Service	Service Description
ARP	Address Resolution Protocol. Used to obtain the hardware network address corresponding to an IP address.
DHCP	Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Allows a host to get an Internet Protocol (IP) address and other Internet configuration parameters without any need for preconfiguration by the user.
BOOTP	Boot Protocol. Allows diskless systems to boot from a remote server.
DNS	Domain Name System. Name service used by the Internet. Uses both TCP and UDP protocols.
FTP	File Transfer Protocol. Reliable file transfer. Allows interactive transfer of ASCII and binary files.
ICMP	Internet Control Message Protocol. Used to relay error and control information. Used by TCP for flow control.
IP	Internet Protocol. The core protocol of the TCP/IP protocol suite.
NTP	Network Time Protocol. Synchronizes the system clock of your host with the system clock of another computer or time source.
RARP	Reverse Address Resolution Protocol. Used primarily in diskless clients systems that have a hardware address but need to find out their IP address.
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Electronic mail delivery protocol.
SNMP	Simple Network Management Protocol. Basis of many network management packages. Allows monitoring of activity throughout a network.
TCP	Transmission Control Protocol. Reliable connection-oriented byte stream transport.
TELNET	Terminal emulation. Enables login and interactive session on a remote system.
TFTP	Trivial File Transfer Protocol. Simpler but less secure version of FTP.
UDP	User Datagram Protocol. Unreliable connectionless datagram transport.

In addition to the base protocols and services, the protocol suite also provides some commonly used utility applications (such as rcp, rsh, and rlogin) built on top of the Internet protocol suite.

The Solaris computing environment also provides heterogeneous distributed computing facilities in its ONC+ architecture. The ONC+ architecture is a set of services built on top of Sun's remote procedure call (RPC) protocol. The programming interfaces available in the ONC+ platform are described in the ONC+ Developer's Guide.