USEFULNESS OF RPC AND XDR                                                                                                          Back To Home

NFS uses the RPC mechanism found in Unix to enforce a client-server relationship on the hosts that use it. RPC allows a host to make a procedure call from a process that appears as if it is local but in fact is executed on a remote machine. Typically, the host on which the call is executed has resources (such as files) needed by the calling host.

XDR (eXternal Data Representation) is a mechanism used by the RPC mechanism (and NFS) to ensure reliable data exchange between hosts. XDR defines a machine independent format for the exchange of binary data.

Source: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jack/ifsm498d/nfs.html