In this chapter, the term tapehost is used to refer to machines with tape drives, and the term client to any other machine in the network accessing the remote tape drives in tapehosts. Any host in the network can be tapehost, client, or both at the same time.
The connection between the client and tapehost is based on the TCP/IP socket interprocess communication. It is of type STREAMS which provides sequenced, reliable, two-way connection based byte streams. client and tapehost talk to each other via a new INET service called mtape. This new service must be available to all hosts through the file /etc/services or its equivalent in the NIS (Network Information System).
The MIDAS tapeserver is spawned by the Internet services daemon inetd. This daemon listens for connections on the Internet addresses of the services that its configuration file /etc/inetd.conf specifies. When a connection on the service mtape is found, it invokes the MIDAS tapeserver daemon /usr/local/etc/in.mtaped.
NOTES: The installation of MIDAS (at least the core) is assumed to be done already. This notes applies to SUN/OS workstations. Slight modifications may apply to other machines.