|
|
The interface between a port monitor and a service is determined solely by the service. Two mechanisms for invoking a service will be presented here as examples.
The first interface is for services that are started anew with each request. This interface requires the port monitor to first fork(2) a child process. The child will eventually become the designated service by performing an exec(2). Before the exec happens, the port monitor may take some port monitor-specific action; however, one action that must occur is the interpretation of the per-service configuration script, if one is present. This is done by calling the library routine doconfig(3iac).
The second interface is for invocations of services that are actively running. To use this interface, a service must have one end of a stream pipe open and be prepared to receive connections through it.