if RPC is coming up, might as well mention CORBA http://www.cilabs.org
which is an OOP paradigm for RPC.
there's tons of info on RPC on the net and there's a decent book from
o'reilly on it.
sun initiated rpc, in the open tradition, so if you have access to sunos or
solaris you certainly have a lot of info on rpc in the man pages (etc)
there.
rpc has a trusted hosts model and a network login model. if you're
familiar with nfs -- that's built on rpc. it's really very flexible but a
lot of systems hackers think it's too slow and rather write their own
sockets code tailored to each problem.
there's rpc (RPCDEV.ZIP) for OS/2 on hobbes.
i thought harvest uses rpc..
-john