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General Daemon Protocol

In general, all the daemons follow the following global rules. There may be exceptions depending on the specific case. Normally, one daemon will be sending commands to another daemon (specifically, the Director to the Storage daemon and the Director to the File daemon).

- Commands are always ASCII commands that are upper/lower case dependent as well as space sensitive.
- All binary data is converted into ASCII (either with printf statements or using base64 encoding).
- All responses to commands sent are always prefixed with a return numeric code where codes in the 1000's are reserved for the Director, the 2000's are reserved for the File daemon, and the 3000's are reserved for the Storage daemon.
- Any response that is not prefixed with a numeric code is a command (or subcommand if you like) coming from the other end. For example, while the Director is corresponding with the Storage daemon, the Storage daemon can request Catalog services from the Director. This convention permits each side to send commands to the other daemon while simultaneously responding to commands.
- Any response that is of zero length, depending on the context, either terminates the data stream being sent or terminates command mode prior to closing the connection.
- Any response that is of negative length is a special sign that normally requires a response. For example, during data transfer from the File daemon to the Storage daemon, normally the File daemon sends continuously without intervening reads. However, periodically, the File daemon will send a packet of length -1 indicating that the current data stream is complete and that the Storage daemon should respond to the packet with an OK, ABORT JOB, PAUSE, etc. This permits the File daemon to efficiently send data while at the same time occasionally ``polling'' the Storage daemon for his status or any special requests.

  Currently, these negative lengths are specific to the daemon, but shortly, the range 0 to -999 will be standard daemon wide signals, while -1000 to -1999 will be for Director user, -2000 to -2999 for the File daemon, and -3000 to -3999 for the Storage daemon.