Isect Middleware How-To - Inventory

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# Inventory

A mostly-bare isect installation comes with four basic programs, isdclient, isdecho, isdexecd, and the middleware daemon, isectd.

`isectd` is the process all clients connect to. The computer it runs on is the only one clients need to find on the network. This is accomplished by aliasing it's hostname in other computers' /etc/hosts files (or by updating NIS maps) to `isectd`.

`isdexecd` is a remote execution daemon that accepts requests from `isectd` to start programs on the computer `isdexecd` is running on. Though `isectd` will typically run on only one computer and there will usually be only one `isectd` process running, there will be one `isdexecd` running on every computer that will have a server (a worker).

`isdecho` is an example worker that simply echoes back to the client whatever it is sent. Though apparently useless on the surface, it provides a good sanity check to make sure the plumbing of the system is working. It also provides an excellent template for programmers to write their own workers that can be arbitrarily more complex (not hard to do).

`isdclient` is a generic isectd client that uses standard input and output to communicate to any server that accepts and replies text (ascii) messages. In most cases this is both sufficient and preferable. `isdclient` accepts arguments specifying which host `isectd` is running on (if it's not the default), which service it wants to talk to, and even a command to execute.

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