> I think that the protocols themselves are probably considered proprietary
> unless they have been released by transarc. Any specs would have to have
> their blessing at least, I would think.
Well, the protocol itself is Rx, which may become freely-redistributable
soon. I can't make any specific comments on that, because I don't know
specific details at the moment.
There are really a few things that have to be well-enough documented
for this to be feasable. First, of course, are the RPC's themselves,
the data structures used by them, meanings of various fields, and so on.
Much of this is documented in /afs/transarc/public/afsps/doc, but not
as much as I remember being able to get online before. I also have a
book labeled "AFS Programmer's Reference Manual", which contains
documentation on the interfaces used by most of the components of the
system (some of this is in /afs/tr/public/afsps/doc/progref, but again,
not as much as I used to be able to find online).
> On Fri, 16 Aug 1996 10:47:12 -0400 Mitch Collinsworth wrote:
> > right. However what if someone knowledgeable were to simply document
> > the protocols and interfaces and then someone at another site were to
> > write new code from that document? Would the result still be
> > considered tainted?
I think it would be good for some people to do that in any event, because
the manual I mentioned above is _way_ out of date, and Transarc has shown
little interest in spending any resources on low-level documentation of
that sort anymore. Now, if such a work appeared, and Transarc blessed its
distribution (which I would hope they would, but who knows...), then
I don't see any reason why someone who didn't have AFS source access
couldn't use that reference to develop a compatible client.
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Systems Programmer, CMU SCS Research Facility
Please send requests and problem reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
