10.6 Remote Procedure Calls
What about the rpcbind service from the scan in the preceding section? RPC stands for remote procedure call (RPC), a system residing in the lower parts of the application layer. It’s designed to make it easier for programmers to build client/server network applications, where a client program calls functions that execute on a remote server. Each type of remote server program is identified by an assigned program number.
RPC implementations use transport protocols such as TCP and UDP, and they require a special intermediary service to map program numbers to TCP and UDP ports. The server is called rpcbind, and it must be running on any machine that wants to use RPC services.
To see what RPC services your computer has, run:
$ rpcinfo -p localhost
RPC is one of those protocols that just doesn’t want to die. The Network File System (NFS) and Network Information Service (NIS) systems use RPC, but they are completely unnecessary on standalone machines. But whenever you think that you’ve eliminated all need for rpcbind, something else comes up, such as File Access Monitor (FAM) support in GNOME.