DCE/RPC Open Source Kick-Start

lkcl writes: "DCE/RPC - the basis for DCOM, Windows NT Domains, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, a large chunk of Microsoft's MSDN APIs, has a new home. In combination with Samba TNG (not to be confused with Samba), dcerpc.net is the developer forum for Windows NT compatible DCE/RPC middleware. For more information on what DCE/RPC can do, see http://dcerpc.net/dcerpc.xvl and http://dcerpc.net/url. Sign up for an account, help end Microsoft's domination. None of this time-wasting browser stuff by the U.S. DoJ and none of this time-wasting multimedia stuff by the European Commission. Go for the *real* stuff - and help kick ass."

A couple of comments

[Guy Harris]

The site doesn't say it's "for Windows NT compatible DCE/RPC middleware"; that's one place where DCE/RPC can be used, but DCE/RPC antedates Microsoft's heavy use of it.

Also, the DCE/RPC information page at that site [dcerpc.net] makes some inaccurate claims about Sun's ONC RPC:

ONC/RPC is limited to using UDP

Not true. Since Day One, it also supported TCP; the Sun TIRPC stuff (done for System V Release 4) also allows it to work on other transports - for example, during at least one Connectathon, testing of NFS and other ONC RPC-based services over OSI transport protocols (I forget whether they did only CLTP or CLTP and COTP) was done, as I remember.

ONC/RPC's security is GSS/API

Not true. ONC RPC does support other authentication flavors, although they're either weak ("none" and "system" authentication), have (I think) been broken (DES authentication) or use Kerberos V4 rather than V5 (Kerberos authentication), so the intent is, as I understand it, to move to GSS/API authentication.

Re:A couple of comments

[lkcl]

thanks for the corrections, guy: i'm not familiar with ONC/RPC. which are the transports and security mechanisms most commonly used? feel free to email me something more technically accurate that i can put on the site, i've neither experience nor authority on ONC/RPC to write accurately about it, but i _do_ want to give a comparative assessement.

"Help end Microsoft's domination"

[NutscrapeSucks]

I'm a little discouraged at lkcl's writeup, which manages to mention "Microsoft" at least 6 times. As pointed out, DCE/RPC was originally a UNIX protocol, developed at Sun and maintained by The Open Group.

While it's true that Microsoft reverse-engineered the protocol and uses it heavily in their network products, I imagine that an open source implementation would be useful for even a pure Unix shop.

The full licence for the real thing [opengroup.org] costs $100,000, although it appears to be free for internal and educational use. Has anyone asked TOG if they would consider an open source licence?

Re:"Help end Microsoft's domination"

[lkcl]

hi there,

well i specifically mention ms a lot because the number of ms platforms out there with well-established and really quite important dce/rpc applications far exceeds those available on unix (most likely because dce/rpc has not been available up until now as open source...)

you are right: DCE/RPC was originally developed for Unix, although it includes support for ECBDIC, VMS and IBM floating-point representations as well as ASCII and IEEE fp.

it was developed by Apollo/HP as NCA 1.0. see http://advogato.org/article/333.html [advogato.org] for a little more of the history and details, including comments from one of the people who worked on dce/rpc for the OSF. [Sun were *not* involved: they _really_ didn't want DCE/RPC to take off :) :)]

TOG's license of $100,000 is for an unlimited distribution binary-only license, i believe: the top rate you ever have to pay.

[but _why_ pay, when freedce is there? :)]

yes, The Open Group have considered releasing their code - under the LGPL. however, their charter, written by the people who _gave_ them the code, doesn't allow them to release under alternative licenses without permission.

so, it's with the lawyers. basically, the dce 1.22 codebase is stagnating, they've lost the plot [all of the programmers and most of the documentation except that which is on-line, already] and so are having a hard time :)

i wish them well, because i want that code out there and to be taken up again!