srradia@watmath.UUCP (sanjay Radia) (01/30/85)
Since Sun's file servers don't maintain any states between requests all their file server operations are idempotent (can be repeated any number of times) with the exception of append (which they don't support) and create (which does not work well depending on the perms). Thus, I suspect, Sun's RPC supports the "atleast once" semantics which is very easy to implement and takes advantage of the low error rate on the ethernet. Of cource this requires that all operations are idempotent. File servers like the Sun's NFS and Xerox's WFS have idempotent operations which can use RPC with "atleast once" semantics but many applications require "exactly once semantics" and Sun's RPC package might not be very useful. -- sanjay UUCP: ...!{ utzoo,decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!watmath!srradia ARPA: srradia%watmath%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa CSNET: srradia%watmath@waterloo.CSNET