Chapter 12 - Important Network Features After successfully (X web hosting)
Chapter 12 - Important Network Features After successfully setting up IP and the resolver, you then must look at the services you want to provide over the network. This chapter covers the configuration of a few simple network applications, including the inetd server and the programs from the rlogin family. We’ll also deal briefly with the Remote Procedure Call interface, upon which services like the Network File System (NFS) and the Network Information System (NIS) are based. The configuration of NFS and NIS, however, is more complex and are described in separate chapters, as are electronic mail and network news. Of course, we can’t cover all network applications in this book. If you want to install one that’s not discussed here, like talk, gopher, or http, please refer to the manual pages of the server for details. The inetd Super Server Programs that provide application services via the network are called network daemons. A daemon is a program that opens a port, most commonly a well-known service port, and waits for incoming connections on it. If one occurs, the daemon creates a child process that accepts the connection, while the parent continues to listen for further requests. This mechanism works well, but has a few disadvantages; at least one instance of every possible service you wish to provide must be active in memory at all times. In addition, the software routines that do the listening and port handling must be replicated in every network daemon. To overcome these inefficiencies, most Unix installations run a special network daemon, what you might consider a “super server.” This daemon creates sockets on behalf of a number of services and listens on all of them simultaneously. When an incoming connection is received on any of these sockets, the super server accepts the connection and spawns the server specified for this port, passing the socket across to the child to manage. The server then returns to listening. The most common super server is called inetd, the Internet Daemon. It is started at system boot time and takes the list of services it is to manage from a startup file named /etc/inetd.conf. In addition to those servers, there are a number of trivial services performed by inetd itself called internal services. They include chargen, which simply generates a string of characters, and daytime, which returns the system’s idea of the time of day. An entry in this file consists of a single line made up of the following fields: service type protocol wait user server cmdline Each of the fields is described in the following list: service Gives the service name. The service name has to be translated to a port number by looking it up in the /etc/services file. This file will be described later in this chapter in the section “The Services and Protocols Files”. type Specifies a socket type, either stream (for connection-oriented protocols) or dgram (for datagram protocols). TCP-based services should therefore always use stream, while UDP-based services should always use dgram. protocol Names the transport protocol used by the service. This must be a valid protocol name found in the protocols file, explained later. wait This option applies only to dgram sockets. It can be either wait or nowait. If wait is specified, inetd executes only one server for the specified port at any time. Otherwise, it immediately continues to listen on the port after executing the server. This is useful for “single-threaded” servers that read all incoming datagrams until no more arrive, and then exit. Most RPC servers are of this type and should therefore specify wait. The opposite type,