Xerox Network Systems

Last updated
XNS
Protocol stack
Purpose LAN
Developer(s) Xerox
Introduction1977;46 years ago (1977)
Influenced 3+Share, Net/One, IPX/SPX, VINES
Hardware Ethernet

Xerox Network Systems (XNS) is a computer networking protocol suite developed by Xerox within the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It provided general purpose network communications, internetwork routing and packet delivery, and higher level functions such as a reliable stream, and remote procedure calls. XNS predated and influenced the development of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model, and was very influential in local area networking designs during the 1980s.

Contents

XNS was developed by the Xerox Systems Development Department in the early 1980s, who were charged with bringing Xerox PARC's research to market. XNS was based on the earlier (and equally influential) PARC Universal Packet (PUP) suite from the late 1970s. Some of the protocols in the XNS suite were lightly modified versions of the ones in the Pup suite. XNS added the concept of a network number, allowing larger networks to be constructed from multiple smaller ones, with routers controlling the flow of information between the networks.

The protocol suite specifications for XNS were placed in the public domain in 1977. This helped XNS become the canonical local area networking protocol, copied to various degrees by practically all networking systems in use into the 1990s. XNS was used unchanged by 3Com's 3+Share and Ungermann-Bass's Net/One. It was also used, with modifications, as the basis for Novell NetWare, and Banyan VINES. XNS was used as the basis for the AppleNet system, but this was never commercialized; a number of XNS's solutions to common problems were used in AppleNet's replacement, AppleTalk.

Description

Overall design

In comparison to the OSI model's 7 layers, XNS is a five-layer system, [1] like the later Internet protocol suite.

The Physical and Data Link layers of the OSI model correspond to the Physical layer (layer 0) in XNS, which was designed to use the transport mechanism of the underlying hardware and did not separate the data link. Specifically, XNS's Physical layer is really the Ethernet local area network system, also being developed by Xerox at the same time, and a number of its design decisions reflect that fact. [1] The system was designed to allow Ethernet to be replaced by some other system, but that was not defined by the protocol (nor had to be).

The primary part of XNS is its definition of the Internal Transport layer (layer 1), which corresponds to OSI's Network layer, and it is here that the primary internetworking protocol, IDP, is defined. XNS combined the OSI's Session and Transport layers into the single Interprocess Communications layer (layer 2). Layer 3 was Resource Control, similar to the OSI's Presentation. [1] [2]

Finally, on top of both models, is the Application layer, although these layers were not defined in the XNS standard. [1]

Basic internetwork protocol

The main internetwork layer protocol is the Internet Datagram Protocol (IDP). IDP is a close descendant of Pup's internetwork protocol, and roughly corresponds to the Internet Protocol (IP) layer in the Internet protocol suite. [1]

IDP uses Ethernet's 48-bit address as the basis for its own network addressing, generally using the machine's MAC address as the primary unique identifier. To this is added another 48-bit address section provided by the networking equipment; 32 bits are provided by routers to identify the network number in the internetwork, and another 16 bits define a socket number for service selection within a single host. The network number portion of the address also includes a special value which meant "this network", for use by hosts which did not (yet) know their network number. [2]

Unlike TCP/IP, socket numbers are part of the full network address in the IDP header, so that upper-layer protocols do not need to implement demultiplexing; IDP also supplies packet types (again, unlike IP). IDP also contains a checksum covering the entire packet, but it is optional, not mandatory. This reflects the fact that LANs generally have low-error rates, so XNS removed error correction from the lower-level protocols in order to improve performance. Error correction could be optionally added at higher levels in the protocol stack, for instance, in XNS's own SPP protocol. XNS was widely regarded as faster than IP due to this design note. [1]

In keeping with the low-latency LAN connections it runs on, XNS uses a short packet size, which improves performance in the case of low error rates and short turnaround times. IDP packets are up to 576 bytes long, including the 30 byte IDP header. [2] In comparison, IP requires all hosts to support at least 576, but supports packets of up to 65K bytes. Individual XNS host pairs on a particular network might use larger packets, but no XNS router is required to handle them, and no mechanism is defined to discover if the intervening routers support larger packets. Also, packets can not be fragmented, as they can in IP.

The Routing Information Protocol (RIP), a descendant of Pup's Gateway Information Protocol, is used as the router information-exchange system, and (slightly modified to match the syntax of addresses of other protocol suites), remains in use today in other protocol suites, such as the Internet protocol suite. [2]

XNS also implements a simple echo protocol at the internetwork layer, similar to IP's ping, but operating at a lower level in the networking stack. Instead of adding the ICMP data as payload in an IP packet, as in ping, XNS's echo placed the command directly within the underlying IDP packet. [2] The same might be achieved in IP by expanding the ICMP Protocol field of the IP header.

Transport layer protocols

There are two primary transport layer protocols, both very different from their Pup predecessor:

XNS, like Pup, also uses EP, the Error Protocol, as a reporting system for problems such as dropped packets. This provided a unique set of packets which can be filtered to look for problems. [2]

Application protocols

Courier RPC

In the original Xerox concept, application protocols such as remote printing, filing, and mailing, etc., employed a remote procedure call protocol named Courier. Courier contained primitives to implement most of the features of Xerox's Mesa programming language function calls. Applications had to manually serialize and de-serialize function calls in Courier; there was no automatic facility to translate a function activation frame into an RPC (i.e. no "RPC compiler" was available). Because Courier was used by all applications, the XNS application protocol documents specified only courier function-call interfaces, and module+function binding tuples. There was a special facility in Courier to allow a function call to send or receive bulk data. [2]

Initially, XNS service location was performed via broadcasting remote procedure-calls using a series of expanding ring broadcasts (in consultation with the local router, to get networks at increasing distances.) Later, the Clearinghouse Protocol 3-level directory service was created to perform service location, and the expanding-ring broadcasts were used only to locate an initial Clearinghouse. [2]

Due to its tight integration with Mesa as an underlying technology, many of the traditional higher-level protocols were not part of the XNS system itself. This meant that vendors using the XNS protocols all created their own solutions for file sharing and printer support. While many of these 3rd party products theoretically could talk to each other at a packet level, there was little or no capability to call each other's application services. This led to complete fragmentation of the XNS market, and has been cited as one of the reasons that IP easily displaced it. [1]

Authentication

The XNS protocols also included an Authentication Protocol and an Authentication Service to support it. Its "Strong credentials" were based on the same Needham–Schroeder protocol that was later used by Kerberos. After contacting the authentication service for credentials, this protocol provided a lightweight way to digitally sign Courier procedure calls, so that receivers could verify the signature and authenticate senders over the XNS internet, without having to contact the Authentication service again for the length of the protocol communication session. [3]

Printing

Xerox's printing language, Interpress, was a binary-formatted standard for controlling laser printers. The designers of this language, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, later left Xerox PARC to start Adobe Systems. Before leaving, they realized the difficulty of specifying a binary print language, where functions to serialize the print job were cumbersome and which made it difficult to debug errant printing jobs. To realize the value of specifying both a programmable and easily debug-able print job in ASCII, Warnock and Geschke created the Postscript language as one of their first products at Adobe.

Remote Debug Protocols

Because all 8000+ machines in the Xerox corporate Intranet ran the Wildflower architecture (designed by Butler Lampson), there was a remote-debug protocol for microcode. Basically, a peek and poke function could halt and manipulate the microcode state of a C-series or D-series machine, anywhere on earth, and then restart the machine.

Also, there was a remote debug protocol for the world-swap debugger. [4] This protocol could, via the debugger "nub", freeze a workstation and then peek and poke various parts of memory, change variables, and continue execution. If debugging symbols were available, a crashed machine could be remote debugged from anywhere on earth.

History

Origins in Ethernet and PUP

In his final year at Harvard University, Bob Metcalfe began interviewing at a number of companies and was given a warm welcome by Jerry Elkind and Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC, who were beginning to work on the networked computer workstations that would become the Xerox Alto. He agreed to join PARC in July, after defending his thesis. In 1970, while couch surfing at Steve Crocker's home while attending a conference, Metcalfe picked up a copy Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference off the table with the aim of falling asleep while reading it. Instead, he became fascinated by an article on ALOHAnet, an earlier wide-area networking system. By June he had developed his own theories on networking and presented them to his professors, who rejected it and he was "thrown out on my ass." [5]

Metcalfe was welcomed at PARC in spite of his unsuccessful thesis, and soon started development of what was then referred to as "ALOHAnet in a wire". He teamed up with David Boggs to help with the electronic implementation, and by the end of 1973 they were building working hardware at 3 Mbit/s. The pair then began working on a simple protocol that would run on the system. This led to the development of the PARC Universal Packet (Pup) system, and by late 1974 the two had Pup successfully running on Ethernet. They filed a patent on the concepts, with Metcalfe adding several other names because he believed they deserved mention, and then submitted a paper on the concept to Communications of the ACM on "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks", published in July 1976. [5]

PUP to XNS

By 1975, long before PUP was complete, Metcalfe was already chafing under the stiff Xerox management. He believed the company should immediately put Ethernet into production, but found little interest among upper management. A seminal event took place when professors from MIT's famed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory approached Xerox in 1974 with the intention of buying Ethernet for use in their lab. Xerox management declined, believing Ethernet was better used to help sell their own equipment. The AI Lab would then go on to make their own version of Ethernet, Chaosnet. [6]

Metcalfe eventually left Xerox November 1975 for Transaction Technology, a division of Citibank tasked with advanced product development. However, he was lured back to Xerox seven months later by David Liddle, who had recently organized the Systems Development Division within Xerox specifically to bring PARCs concepts to market. Metcalfe immediately began re-designing Ethernet to work at 20 Mbit/s and started an effort to re-write Pup in a production quality version. Looking for help on Pup, Metcalfe approached Yogen Dalal, who was at that time completing his PhD thesis under Vint Cerf at Stanford University. Dalal was also being heavily recruited by Bob Kahn's ARPANET team (working on TCP/IP), but when Cerf left to join DARPA, Dalal agreed to move to PARC and started there in 1977. [7]

Dalal built a team including William Crowther and Hal Murray, and started with a complete review of Pup. Dalal also attempted to remain involved in the TCP efforts underway at DARPA, but eventually gave up and focussed fully on Pup. Dalal combined his experience with ARPANET with the concepts from Pup and by the end of 1977 they had published the first draft of the Xerox Network System specification. This was essentially a version of Pup with absolute 48-bit host IDs, and TCP's 3-Way handshake in the Sequenced Packet Protocol. [8]

By early 1978 the new system was working, but management was still not making any move to commercialize it. As Metcalfe put it:

When I came back to Xerox in 1976, we were about two and a half years from product shipment and in 1978 we were about two and a half years from product shipment. [7]

When no further action was forthcoming, Metcalfe left the company at the end of 1978. [7]

Impact

Last used by Xerox for communication with the DocuTech 135 Publishing System, XNS is no longer in use, due to the ubiquity of IP. However, it played an important role in the development of networking technology in the 1980s, by influencing software and hardware vendors to seriously consider the need for computing platforms to support more than one network protocol stack simultaneously.

A wide variety of proprietary networking systems were directly based on XNS or offered minor variations on the theme. Among these were Net/One, 3+, [1] Banyan VINES [9] and Novell's IPX/SPX. [10] These systems added their own concepts on top of the XNS addressing and routing system; VINES added a directory service among other services, while Novell NetWare added a number of user-facing services like printing and file sharing. AppleTalk used XNS-like routing, but had incompatible addresses using shorter numbers.

XNS also helped to validate the design of the 4.2BSD network subsystem by providing a second protocol suite, one which was significantly different from the Internet protocols; by implementing both stacks in the same kernel, Berkeley researchers demonstrated that the design was suitable for more than just IP. [11] Additional BSD modifications were eventually necessary to support the full range of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocols.

Literature

Xerox Network Systems Architecture Introduction to Xerox Network Systems (XNSG 058504) is "a general discussion meant for those who want to know how office people can become more effective and productive by using the Xerox Network Systems." [12] : p.5 

The components of Xerox Network Systems Architecture are briefly described in Xerox Network Systems Architecture General Information Manual (XNSG 068504). [13]

A series of sixteen individual protocol descriptions are listed in the Xerox Systems Institute Literature Catalog. [12] Possibly more recent versions of these standards are:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethernet</span> Computer networking technology

Ethernet is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET.

Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interconnected networks are called an internetwork, or simply an internet.

Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) is the network layer protocol in the IPX/SPX protocol suite. IPX is derived from Xerox Network Systems' IDP. It also has the ability to act as a transport layer protocol.

The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Local area network</span> Computer network that connects devices over a limited area

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger geographic distance, but also generally involves leased telecommunication circuits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OSI model</span> Model of communication of seven abstraction layers

The Open Systems Interconnection model is a conceptual model from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems interconnection." In the OSI reference model, the communications between systems are split into seven different abstraction layers: Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application.

In computer networking, Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is a data link layer communication protocol between two routers directly without any host or any other networking in between. It can provide loop detection authentication, transmission encryption, and data compression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Protocol stack</span> Comprehensive computer networking implementation

The protocol stack or network stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite or protocol family. Some of these terms are used interchangeably but strictly speaking, the suite is the definition of the communication protocols, and the stack is the software implementation of them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3Com</span> Former American maker of computer network products

3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe explained the name 3Com was a contraction of "Computer Communication Compatibility", with its focus on Ethernet technology that he had co-invented, which enabled the networking of computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Packet switching</span> Method for transmitting data over a computer network

In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into packets that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a communication protocol used for discovering the link layer address, such as a MAC address, associated with a given internet layer address, typically an IPv4 address. This mapping is a critical function in the Internet protocol suite. ARP was defined in 1982 by RFC 826, which is Internet Standard STD 37.

Banyan VINES is a discontinued network operating system developed by Banyan Systems for computers running AT&T's UNIX System V.

The PARC Universal Packet was one of the two earliest internetworking protocol suites; it was created by researchers at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s. The entire suite provided routing and packet delivery, as well as higher level functions such as a reliable byte stream, along with numerous applications.

EFTP was a very simple file transfer protocol developed as part of the PARC Universal Packet protocol suite at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s. It was the inspiration for the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) in the TCP/IP suite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer network</span> Network that allows computers to share resources and communicate with each other

A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.

David Reeves Boggs was an American electrical and radio engineer who developed early prototypes of Internet protocols, file servers, gateways, network interface cards and, along with Robert Metcalfe and others, co-invented Ethernet, the most popular family of technologies for local area computer networks.

John F. Shoch is an American computer scientist and venture capitalist who made significant contributions to the development of computer networking while at Xerox PARC, in particular to the development of the PARC Universal Protocol (PUP), an important predecessor of TCP/IP.

In computer networking, the link layer is the lowest layer in the Internet protocol suite, the networking architecture of the Internet. The link layer is the group of methods and communications protocols confined to the link that a host is physically connected to. The link is the physical and logical network component used to interconnect hosts or nodes in the network and a link protocol is a suite of methods and standards that operate only between adjacent network nodes of a network segment.

A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s and has since resulted in most other protocols disappearing.

References

Citations
  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Stephens 1989, p. 15.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 cisco.
  3. 1 2 Xerox Corporation (April 1984). Xerox System Integration Standard Authentication Protocol (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  4. ↑ "World-stop debuggers". 1999-01-25. Retrieved 2013-07-05.
  5. 1 2 Pelkey 2007, 6.7.
  6. ↑ Pelkey 2007, 6.8.
  7. 1 2 3 Pelkey 2007, 6.9.
  8. ↑ Pelkey 2007, 6.10.
  9. ↑ Banyan VINES, cisco
  10. ↑ NetWare Protocols, cisco
  11. ↑ Larus, James (1983). "On the performance of Courier Remote Procedure Calls under 4.1c BSD" (PDF). UC Berkeley ECE Department. Retrieved 2013-07-05.
  12. 1 2 Xerox Corporation. Xerox Systems Institute Literature Catalog (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  13. ↑ Xerox Corporation (April 1985). Xerox Network Systems General Information Manual (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  14. ↑ Xerox Corporation (April 1984). Clearinghouse Entry Formats (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  15. ↑ Xerox Corporation (December 1981). Courier: The Remote Procedure Call Protocol . Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  16. ↑ Digital Equipment Corporation; Intel Corporation; Xerox Corporation (November 1982). The Ethernet A Local Area Network Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  17. ↑ Xerox Corporation (May 1986). Filing Protocol (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  18. ↑ Xerox Corporation (December 1985). Font Interchange Standard (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  19. ↑ Xerox Corporation (December 1981). Internet Transport Protocols (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  20. ↑ Xerox Corporation (January 1986). lnterpress Electronic Printing Standard (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2023.
Bibliography
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