[Bug 281541] rpcinfo: format of argument to -a flag is undocumented

From: <bugzilla-noreply_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2024 18:27:03 UTC
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=281541

            Bug ID: 281541
           Summary: rpcinfo: format of argument to -a flag is undocumented
           Product: Documentation
           Version: Latest
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Only Me
          Priority: ---
         Component: Manual Pages
          Assignee: bugs@FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: wollman@FreeBSD.org
                CC: doc@FreeBSD.org

It says:

             If versnum is not specified, rpcinfo tries to ping all available
             version numbers for that program number.  This option avoids
             calls to remote rpcbind to find the address of the service.  The
             serv_address is specified in universal address format of the
             given transport.

However, "universal address format" is not defined anywhere. It's not even
easily googlable. I ended up reading an implementation (in the Linux kernel,
oddly enough) to find out what it actually is: it appends the port number to
the numeric form of the address, *as big-endian octets separated by dots*.
Thus, for example, port 2049 is represented as ".8.1".

I think this is a consequence of the incomplete assimilation of TI-RPC from 20
years ago, but it's long past time to at least document what this syntax is.

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