OT: RPC?

Remote procedure call. It's mostly as opposed to 'local procedure call.'

Back in the early days (in the Babylonion days), say when Apollo Computers made the DN3000, the idea was roughly to allow a program to run on multiple workstations, of similar manufacture and operating system, at once using the network to pass parameters. It's also related to the transputer (different things going on in that world, but not so different idea on the whole.) A fancy operating system could/would automatically "diffuse" a program across a networked matrix of processors in such a way that the bandwidth used to exchange parameters to subroutines (or collections of them) wasn't choked, but was busy. If it wasn't busy enough, time to diffuse the program outward some more. If it got too busy, collect up some things that talk to each other a lot onto one.

It has all been hammered out and broadened to mean something a little "bigger" than before, allowing heterogenous systems and collections of systems to interoperate -- in theory. Basically, an RPC is a call to any procedure that sits in a different address space. This can be a different logical address space on the same processor, or different core on the same IC, or a separate core on a different IC but on the same bus, or possibly even some kid in a hut with a piece of paper and a pencil workout each next problem and passing results back by way of a 5' Chinese runner to the nearest phone booth. It's faily non-descript, in other words, except that you cannot call the procedure by using an address within your own address space. That's a "local procedure call," instead.

Microsoft supports them.

Go here:

My cousin, David DiNucci, has been working on something not too far afield -- F-nets and software cabling -- though it has been some years since I talked with him about it. I believe, but I'm not sure, it was statically analyzed. There's another approach, more as I descibe above, called Stressflow which may compete with David's ideas... though again I'm not sure not having spent more than a very short time worrying about these things. Also look up GANESH.

etc.

Jon

Trojan portal.

John

I had the same idea once about disabling the RPC service. Looked like a perfect attack point.

Unfortunately, Mickey$oft also uses it for lots of internal service like cut-and-paste, and also for tools like the Configuration manager. The last one is needed to turn the service on again. So, this was a catch-22. Re-installing Windows solved the problem...

Happy hacking! Arie de Muynck

It isn't relevant. You need RPC even for a standalone system, but you don't need rpccfg.exe.

rpccfg configures which ports, subnets, interfaces etc to use for RPC. It's useful mainly if you are using RPC on a complex network where subnets are firewalled off from each other, and you need to configure RPC to use ports (etc) which are allowed through the firewall.

You make it a bit more understandable than the wiki dictionary.

With or without Schroedinger's cat?

Cut and paste? Seems to work after the scrub. Configuration manager? How does one tell if that got messed after the scrub?

After the scrub i did,i do not think RPC is running - how does one check?

Ctrl-alt-delete, then click the "Task Manager" button.

Good Luck! Rich

That won't tell you, as RPC is a service. You will always see a buch of svchost.exe processes running, but that doesn't tell you which services are running.

On XP, use Start Menu -> Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Services

The service is called "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)".

If you disable it, I wouldn't count on your system continuing to work. "Remote" doesn't just mean between systems, but also between different processes on the same system.

Ahhh....thanks!