Inside Macintosh: Networking With Open Transport / Part 1 - Open Transport Essentials

Chapter 13 - AppleTalk Addressing

This chapter describes how to specify an AppleTalk address to bind an endpoint, to connect to an AppleTalk service or to make your endpoint visible to other endpoints across an Open Transport AppleTalk network. Whenever you want to communicate across the network, you need to be able to identify your own local endpoint and the remote endpoint with which you want to communicate. You can use a name, a network address, or a combination of the two to identify the endpoints. Open Transport provides a specific address format for each of these cases and several utility functions to initialize them.

In order for you to make the name of your AppleTalk endpoint visible to other applications on a network, you must register its name. There are various ways of doing this, but in either case, Open Transport uses the Name Binding Protocol (NBP) to associate the endpoint's name with its network address. Open Transport provides several utility functions and a specialized data structure, the NBP entity, for more convenient manipulation of NBP names.

This chapter introduces endpoint and mapper functions that you can use to register a name, to look up name and address information, and to browse for all protocol addresses associated with a name or name pattern. For complete reference information, see "AppleTalk Addressing Reference".

You should read this chapter if your application uses an AppleTalk networking protocol and you need to

• specify a local or remote address

• register and delete endpoints as network-visible entities

• look up other endpoint names, using wildcards as needed to match
  partial names

• initialize address structures

• get and set other endpoint name information

Some of these tasks are available through endpoint and mapper functions, which are described in the chapters "Endpoints" and "Mappers" in this book. You should be familiar with the material in those chapters before you read this chapter.

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Chapter Contents

About AppleTalk Addressing

Using AppleTalk Addressing

Specifying a DDP Address

Specifying an NBP Address

Specifying a Combined DDP-NBP Address

Specifying and Using a Multinode Address

Registering Your Endpoint's Name

Looking Up Names and Addresses

Manipulating an NBP Name