TIME and SEND

[barmar@THINK.COM]

   Date: Thu, 10 Aug 89 18:45:35 EST
   From: grover@potomac.ads.com (Mark D. Grover)

   What do the TCP and UDP TIME protocols buy you on a Symbolics that
   CHAOS doesn't?  I can't find doc on this (at least in the main manual
   set).  In particular, can one of my Suns provide time-of-day service
   when I boot a lone Symbolics on the local net? How?

The TCP and UDP time protocols are essentially equivalent to the CHAOS
ones.  What they buy you is compatibility with non-Symbolics machines.
These protocols are documented in Internet RFC868 (in the file
NIC.SRI.COM:RFC:<RFC>RFC868.TXT).

Unfortunately, this doesn't really help you at boot time.  When a
Lispm is trying to get the time when it boots, it sends out a CHAOS
broadcast.  Therefore, it will only get responses from CHAOS hosts.
The Symbolics UDP software doesn't provide good support for UDP
broadcasts, so it would not currently be very easy to change this to
use UDP.

   Bonus question: what does SEND TCP SMTP buy me with respect to
   heterogenous machines?  Can I run Converse between my Symbolics and
   some other vendor's machine?  Whose?

While the SMTP specification includes facilities for sending immediate
messages, they are not implemented by most mail servers (i.e. Unix
sendmail doesn't implement it).  Unfortunately, this is the only
standard message protocol that's ever been defined for the Internet,
so this means that there's NO standard protocol usable for Converse.

   PS. What am I not reading that I should be?

Internet standards (maybe the IP-TCP documentation has a "Related
Publications" section that documents the appropriate ones -- if not,
it should).  Symbolics shouldn't waste their resources documenting
things that are adequately documented elsewhere.

						barmar