COMMENTS ON RFC #114 (A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL)

1 A file transfer protocol is needed. Bushan's proposal would

satisfy a particular current need that we have, as well as short-term

envisioned needs.

2 Bushan's protocol would apear to be straight- forward in

implementation, and extensible as claimed.

3 We would like to see implementations of such protocol be

accomplished such that the file transfer pro- gram has general and

complete access to the local file storage. That is, it should be able

to access a file that it did not create. For example, if a program or

user creates a file at site X (completely independent of the file

trans- fer program), it would then be desirable to be able to retrieve

the file via the file transfer program. This is not a requirement of

RFC #114 but we would like to see it implemented where possible.

4 Since implementation of a subset of transaction types is

specifically permitted, we suggest inclusion of the following commands

(in addition to append).

      insert records     within a file
      delete records     from within a file
      replace records    within a file

Although these operations are not directly supported under IBM

OS/360, we have used them with a non-standard file subsystem under IBM

OS/360 and find them quite useful.

5 In addition to retrieve and lookup, get names of files under

my access control would be useful.

6 The absence of status requests and responses is apparent.

Although this is typically a function associated with a remote job

entry (RJE) system, since the execute request is present it would seem

appropriate to inquire about the status of the process created by the

execute command. This becomes increasingly more important where the

execute is implemented as an RJE-like operation and scheduling time of

the job might be prolonged.

7 When requesting execute, the using host sends parameters upon

receipt of the rr response. Executing a task can be implemented in

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the attach macro. Our preference would be the attach macro which

immediately initiates an independent OS task within the partition of

the program issuing the attach (presumably the File Service). Such a

task normally receives parameters upon initiation and can thereafter

receive parameters from a program via some mechanism such as an event

control block. The second method requires special modifications to

the program being executed; hence, it is not desirable. Therefore, we

either need the parameters included in the execute command or will not

actually start execution until parameters are received.

8 Upon abnormal termination, one should include part or all of

the spurious request as well as an identify- ing code to facilitate

precise error recognition.

9 We would be interested in the outcome of the MIT/ Harvard

experiments with the RFC #114 protocol. What were the pitfalls, etc.?

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by Simone Demmel 4/97 ]

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