ONC+ technologies consist of a family of technologies, services, and tools. These technologies are backward compatible and interoperate with the installed base of ONC services. The main components are described. This guide covers the technologies that require the use of programming facilities.
The transport-independent remote procedure call (TI-RPC) was developed as part of UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4). TI-RPC makes RPC applications transport-independent by enabling a single binary version of a distributed program to run on multiple transports. Previously, with transport-specific RPC, the transport was bound at compile time so that applications could not use other transports unless the program was rebuilt. With TI-RPC, applications can use new transports if the system administrator updates the network configuration file and restarts the program. Thus, no changes are required to the binary application.
External data representation (XDR) is an architecture-independent specification for representing data. It resolves the differences in data byte ordering, data type size, representation, and alignment between different architectures. Applications that use XDR can exchange data across heterogeneous physical machines.
NFS is a distributed computing file system that provides transparent access to remote file systems on heterogeneous networks. In this way, users can share files among PCs, workstations, mainframes, and supercomputers. As long as users are connected to the same network, the files appear as though they are on the user's desktop. The NFS environment features Kerberos V5 authentication, multithreading, the network lock manager, and the automounter.
NFS does not have programming facilities, so it is not covered in this guide. However, the specification for NFS is available at the following sites: