[This is an update of my former design note, which clarifies some points] THE WORKBENCH The users starts 'ewb' normally. He then decides on which machine M he wants to run the application and he requests the workbench to connect itself to the remote 'ised' daemon on that machine. The workbench then gives the user a path name like "/tmp/ised-013456", which must be remembered. Once this is done, the user must issue an 'rlogin' on that machine and set the ISED environment variable to the cookie the workbench gave him when it started the connection on the machine. THE DAEMON The 'ised' daemon runs as root and does not play any active role in the communication process. It simply acts as a relay and an initiator. When invoked, the daemon computes a unique path name in /tmp, say /tmp/ised-0001 and sends it back to the workbench which in turn will give it to the user. Ised then starts opening this file for reading and therefore falls into a peaceful kernel sleep. The daemon will wake up as soon as someone opens the named socket or pipe for writing. Then, it will immediately act as a 'blocking' relay, which means its I/O communications with the other end of the named socket or pipe will be blocking ones. Everything which comes from the application is immediately routed to the attached 'ewb' process while everything coming from that process will be written into the application. THE APPLICATION Upon start up, the application looks at its 'ISED' environment variable and uses it to get the pathname of the named socket. It then opens it for writing (hence waking up the daemon waiting on the other end) and is ready to start its processing, connected to the remote workbench. [Discussions of pros and cons removed--no change] WHAT CHANGED The white pages mechanism has been replaced by a lower-level mechanism where the user deals with pathnames directly. This is much more easy for us to handle, as it solves the ever-growing problem we would have otherwise encountered with the so-called 'wp' file. DEADLINE This scheme will be implemented by Thursday April 23th, 17:00:32 PST :-)