Spawning daemons.

[Pratap Subrahmanyam]

Hi,

I have a question about daemon creation. I have always used the following
approach whenever I needed to create a server/clients system. I fork a 
process with superuser privileges which sets up all the communication
protocols and then waits for somebody to talk to it.

The user processes communicate asyncronously whenever they please. This works
fine except for the fact that the daemon has to come on usually at boot time
of machine.

This is a big problem if the daemon has to a lot of book-keeping work from
time to time, like communication statistics, and hence becomes a CPU hog.
Nicing it is one way. But is there another way to solve this problem ??

If the daemon need not be alive for too long 'before' the first client tries
to talk to it, then I have the following scheme. The first user, when he tries
to talk to the daemon finds the communication protocol not set up (like FIFO
files in /tmp) and then figures out that it is the first user and hence fires 
the daemon up. Now it could die, leaving UNIX to make the undying child process
the child of root and hence a true daemon.

But this is clumsy because the user has to relogin. Any suggestions are 
welcome.

Pratap.
.... pratap%hpcllcm at hplabs.hp.com