ONC RPC is now a Draft Standard

Another RFC, another time to post in fixed width.

Just to re-cap, Internet RFCs which are standards-track, come in three flavors (maturity levels):

• Proposed - entry level, zero to little experience
• Draft - at least two unique and interoperable implementations
• Internet Standard - more implementation experience, and 4 months have elapsed since Draft status was established

ONC RPC (the remote procedure call protocol that NFS uses) has been at Proposed since 1995, when Raj Srinivasan of Sun was the editor who guided the process of moving ONC RPC into IETF's hands.

On May 4, 2009, IETF announced that Rob Thurlow's (of Sun) editing work to make ONC RPC a Draft Standard was done, and as a consequence RFC5531 is now available. Congratulations to Rob.

Hopefully, Internet Standard status will not be far behind. RPC can then join XDR in an exclusive club of full standards.

Comments

[Keith Brown]

So I was wondering where the wheel is currently sitting in this process Mike? I've been waiting to put four of them on my car, but have been worried they might decide to change the shape of wheels before they are made a "full standard", so... ;-)

[Mike Eisler]

Keith: ONC RPC is as locked down as it gets. There is nearly zero chance that IETF would change ONC RPC in a way that produces an incompatibility. And I'd say that is only a slightly higher chance IETF would add a new version of ONC RPC. I haven't seen any interest in an ONC RPC version 3.

Feel free to add to the hundreds of thousands of registered ONC RPC applications (see http://www.iana.org/assignments/rpc-program-numbers/rpc-program-numbers.txt for the known list ) that are out there.