Address Look-up Services

Transport services do not provide address look-up services. They provide only message transfer across a network. A client program needs a way to obtain the address of its server program. In previous system releases this service was performed by portmap. In this release, rpcbind replaces the portmap utility.

RPC makes no assumption about the structure of a network address. It handles universal addresses specified only as null-terminated strings of ASCII characters. RPC translates universal addresses into local transport addresses by using routines specific to the transport. For more details on these routines, see the netdir(3NSL) and rpcbind(3NSL) man pages.

rpcbind enables you to perform the following operations:

• Add a registration

• Delete a registration

• Get address of a specified program number, version number, and transport

• Get the complete registration list

• Perform a remote call for a client

Registering Addresses

rpcbind maps RPC services to their addresses, so rpcbind's address must be known. The name-to-address translation routines must reserve a known address for each type of transport used. For example, in the Internet domain, rpcbind has port number 111 on both TCP and UDP. When rpcbind is started, it registers its location on each of the transports supported by the host. rpcbind is the only RPC service that must have a known address.

For each supported transport, rpcbind registers the addresses of RPC services and makes the addresses available to clients. A service makes its address available to clients by registering the address with the rpcbind daemon. The address of the service is then available to rpcinfo(1M) and to programs using library routines named in the rpcbind(3NSL) man page. No client or server can assume the network address of an RPC service.

Client and server programs and client and server hosts are usually distinct but they need not be. A server program can also be a client program. When one server calls another rpcbind server it makes the call as a client.

To find a remote program's address, a client sends an RPC message to a host's rpcbind daemon. If the service is on the host, the daemon returns the address in an RPC reply message. The client program can then send RPC messages to the server's address. A client program can minimize its calls to rpcbind by storing the network addresses of recently called remote programs.

The RPCBPROC_CALLIT procedure of rpcbind enables a client to make a remote procedure call without knowing the address of the server. The client passes the target procedure's program number, version number, procedure number, and calling arguments in an RPC call message. rpcbind looks up the target procedure's address in the address map and sends an RPC call message, including the arguments received from the client, to the target procedure.

When the target procedure returns results, RPCBPROC_CALLIT passes them to the client program. It also returns the target procedure's universal address so that the client can later call it directly.

The RPC library provides an interface to all rpcbind procedures. Some of the RPC library procedures also call rpcbind automatically for client and server programs. For details, see RPC Language Specification.

Reporting RPC Information

rpcinfo is a utility that reports current RPC information registered with rpcbind. rpcinfo, with either rpcbind or the portmap utility, reports the universal addresses and the transports for all registered RPC services on a specified host. rpcinfo can call a specific version of a specific program on a specific host and report whether a response is received. rpcinfo can also delete registrations. For details, see the rpcinfo(1M) man page.