HP 600 Series, Services And Applications

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A Primer on HP Probe
HP Probe is a Hewlett-Packard proprietary protocol used on HP nodes. It is
an unreliable-connectionless request reply protocol designed to provide the
name-to-address mapping information between HP nodes using Network
Services (NS), and on HP Data Communications and Terminal Controllers
(DTCs). NS and some DTC services use TCP/IP as the transport, and
therefore use IP and link-level station (MAC) addresses to address packets
between nodes. However, NS users access nodes in terms of their names. On
an NS network, a user supplies a node name to the local transport layer
when he wants to set up a connection with it. (NS uses the format
node.domain.organization for its node names.) If it does not already
know the address for the destination node, then one or more Probe requests
are generated. The destination of the request is a target node or a Probe
name server (called a proxy server), which will respond with a Probe reply
that contains the requested path or address information. A Probe name server
is a machine that contains a mapping of names to addresses for the network
and other nodes in the internet.
The information returned in a Probe reply packet is a path report. It contains
the supported protocol stacks (e.g., TCP, IP, IEEE 802.2), services (e.g.,
DSCOPY), and address information of the target node. The path report is
used by the requester to provide name-to-address mappings in order to
create a connection or communicate with the target node.
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