A utility called 'Dispatcher' may be used to either broadcast or receive data from SNOMAN in real time. Dispatcher is a tool written by the ControlHost Team on the CASPUR consortium (ControlHost@caspur.it). In order to transmit the data from a source to a destination computer, both must have a connection to a ``dispatching'' computer, which in turn, must have a ``Dispatcher'' running on it. Starting up a dispatching system is a slightly non-trivial operation, and beyond the scope of this document. The stalwart SNOMAN warrior can request further assistance from duba@u.washington.edu.
This feature requires requires the dispatcher library, which is not part of the SNOMAN release. For this reason, it is disabled by default. To enable it, pass the code through EXTRACT selecting the DISPATCH_PRESENT option.
To use the dispatcher features in Snoman, simply specify the input or output device type as ``MEM''. Example:
file out 1 loveboat.sno.laurentian.ca device=$memor, for input:
file in 2 localhost device=$mem
The performance of the Dispatch link can be probed by running the executable called
dispstat. This should return the startup time of the Dispatcher, followed by a listing of all the data types. Under each data type row, Dispatcher lists the number of chunks of each data type received, sent, and still being handled. After the list of the data types comes the list of the clients which are currently connected to the dispatcher, each with their nick name, connection time, and some basic transmission statistics. For example:
line 6, host surf.sno.laurentian.ca, nick RLG, from Sat Apr 25 16:05 1998 stat: got 1777, tot 1787, gotlast 94, totlast 94 subscr: w RUNLOGThis means that the process 'RLG' has been connected since the listed time, and since that time, has received 1777 of 1787 possible data chunks, which were all of the type ``RUNLOG''.