RPC.STATD(8)            OpenBSD System Manager's Manual           RPC.STATD(8)

NAME
     rpc.statd - host status monitoring daemon

SYNOPSIS
     rpc.statd [-d]

DESCRIPTION
     rpc.statd is a daemon which co-operates with rpc.statd daemons on other
     hosts to provide a status monitoring service.  The daemon accepts re-
     quests from programs running on the local host (typically, rpc.lockd(8),
     the NFS file locking daemon) to monitor the status of specified hosts.
     If a monitored host crashes and restarts, the remote daemon will notify
     the local daemon, which in turn will notify the local program(s) which
     requested the monitoring service.  Conversely if this host crashes and
     restarts when rpc.statd restarts, it will notify all of the hosts which
     were being monitored at the time of the crash.

     The options available are:

     -d      Causes debugging information to be written to syslog(3), record-
             ing all RPC transactions to the daemon.  These messages are
             logged with level LOG_DEBUG and facility LOG_DAEMON.  Error con-
             ditions are logged irrespective of this option, using level
             LOG_ERR.

     The rpc.statd daemon must NOT be invoked by inetd(8) because the protocol
     assumes that the daemon will run from system start time.  Instead, it
     should be configured in rc.conf(8) to run at system startup.

FILES
     /usr/include/rpcsvc/sm_inter.x  RPC protocol specification used by local
                                     applications to register monitoring re-
                                     quests.
     /var/db/statd.status            Non-volatile record of currently moni-
                                     tored hosts.

SEE ALSO
     syslog(3), rc.conf(8), rpc.lockd(8)

STANDARDS
     This implementation is based on the specification in the X/Open CAE Spec-
     ification C218, "Protocols for X/Open PC Interworking: XNFS, Issue 4",
     ISBN 1 872630 66 9.

HISTORY
     A version of rpc.statd appeared in SunOS 4.

BUGS
     There is no means for the daemon to tell when a monitored host has disap-
     peared permanently (e.g. catastrophic hardware failure), as opposed to
     transient failure of the host or an intermediate router.  At present, it
     will retry notification attempts at frequent intervals for 10 minutes,
     then hourly, and finally gives up after 24 hours.

     The protocol requires that symmetric monitor requests are made to both
     the local and remote daemon in order to establish a monitored relation-
     ship.  This is convenient for the NFS locking protocol, but probably re-
     duces the usefulness of the monitoring system for other applications.

     The current implementation uses more than 1Kbyte per monitored host in
     the status file (and also in VM).  This may be inefficient for NFS
     servers with large numbers of clients.

OpenBSD 4.7                      June 15, 2008                               1
