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RPC Call Binding
Now we have the necessary theory to complete our picture of the RPC binding process. An RPC application is formally packaged into a program with one or more procedure calls. In a manner similar to the port assignments described above, the RPC program is assigned an integer identifier known to the program that will call its procedures. Each procedure is also assigned a number that is also known by its caller. ONC RPC uses a program called portmap to allocate port numbers for RPC programs. Its operation is illustrated in Figure 2. When an RPC program is started, it registers itself with the portmap process running on the same host. The portmap process then assigns the TCP and/or UDP port numbers to be used by that application.
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The RPC application then waits for and accepts connections at that port number. Prior to calling the remote procedure, the caller also contacts portmap to obtain the corresponding port number being used by the application whose procedures it needs to call. The network connection provides the means for the caller to reach the correct program on the remote host. The correct procedure is reached through the use of a dispatch table in the RPC program. The same registration process that establishes the port number also creates the dispatch table. The dispatch table is indexed by procedure number and contains the addresses of all the XDR filter routines as well as the addresses of the actual procedures.
If the discussion of the mechanisms supporting RPC sounds complex, that's because it is. Fortunately, the development of RPC applications can be greatly simplified through the use of rpcgen, the protocol compiler. rpcgen has its own input language which is used to declare programs, their procedures and the data types for the procedures' parameters and return values. This is best illustrated by an example. The source code for an average procedure is shown in Listing 1.