Satz@SRI-NIC.ARPA (08/01/84)
From: Greg Satz <Satz@SRI-NIC.ARPA> I just finished up an rwho daemon with the associated ruptime and rwho user programs for TOPS-20. For those of you who don't know what the rwho daemon does, let me explain. 4.2bsd Unix has a daemon which runs in the background transmitting and listening for broadcast UDP packets over an ethernet. The packets contain information about particular systems, such as their names, number of users, load averages, uptime as well as some info about each user who is on the system at the time. At five minute intervals, rwhod wakes up and sends out this information to other systems. rwhod writes out this info into one file per host where rwho and ruptime can read it. ruptime displays one line per system containing the system name, number of users on, load averages, and uptime. rwho displays all of the users on all of the systems. Mike Muuss (mike@brl) made changes to the Unix rwho daemon to allow it to send packets to hosts not on an ethernet. This allows agreeing Internet sites to exchange user/host info. My version for TOPS-20 can exchange rwho UDP packets with any 4.2bsd or TOPS-20 site running the daemon. It utilizes Vince Fuller's UDP library package for all UDP transactions. At startup, the daemon reads the file SYSTEM:HOSTS.UDP for a list of hosts to send udp packets to. Each host is on a separate line and A.B.C.D address are accepted. A version of the user programs exist but aren't fully implemented. ruptime only outputs hosts in alphabetical order. rwho just outputs users in the order they are received in the packet. To be useful, it should sort the usernames alphabetically like the unix version. If anyone is interested in a copy of these programs, let me know. -------