dennis@rlgvax.UUCP (Dennis.Bednar) (11/13/87)
In article <8711082334.aa00326@Louie.UDEL.EDU>, dzoey@TERMINUS.UMD.EDU writes: > > I am curious as to what other "standard" networking interfaces look like. > How does Sys5 handle the network with their streams concept? What other > networking interfaces are around? Here at CCI, when Rick Adams was working here 3 years ago, we had the problem of supporting 4.2BSD TCP/IP for the VAX, and the UNET code from 3com for a CCI power 5/20 running System 3. The interface to the network software was different, and so Rick came up with a "common library interface" that allowed applications to be written one way regardless of whether they ran under 4.2 TCP/IP or UNET TCP/IP: tcpinit() on 4.2 it did some initialization to do the auto-forking upon completion of the passive tcpopen later (ie the child process receives the open fd to to the network file transfer, while the parent process goes back to waiting for a new incoming connection). If I remember correctly, on UNET, it did nothing. tcpopen() modelled to match the UNET style of call. You pass the host name you want to connect to, the remote TCP port number (which identifies the service, such as FTP, Telnet, etc.), a local TCP port number (for an active connection this was 0 which chose an unused number, for a passive connection, this identfied the service), a remote TCP port number (similar to the local TCP port number), and a constant which said either TO_ACTIVE or TO_PASSIVE. Tcpopen returned -1 error, or the raw file descriptor to do the i/o. read/write same on both machines, same as UNIX. tcpclose() both were basically a close(). There was never a need for any application to do anything fancy like the URGENT you mentioned. Later, we ported the library package to work with the same interface to the Excelan ethernet card I mentioned in an earlier article, with no problems (other than No Software Interface documentation - we winged it by running nm on their libsocket.a, and noting how similar the public entry points were similar to some of the Berkeley routines [rhosts comes to mind]). -- FullName: Dennis Bednar UUCP: {uunet|sundc}!rlgvax!dennis USMail: CCI; 11490 Commerce Park Dr.; Reston VA 22091 Telephone: +1 703 648 3300