Daemon question.

[kilerboots]

Well I am a newbie and I wanted to know exactly what daemon does and its capabilitys, also what you need to run it. I know I could find this on the internet or google but I thought you guys would explain it a lot better. Also are there any good links that i could find a lot more bout it?

>Thanks!

[HTRegz]

Hey Hey

First off.. to give you the webopedia definition.

Pronounced DEE-mun or DAY-mun. A process that runs in the background and performs a specified operation at predefined times or in response to certain events. The term daemon is a UNIX term, though many other operating systems provide support for daemons, though they're sometimes called other names. Windows, for example, refers to daemons and System Agents and services.
Typical daemon processes include print spoolers, e-mail handlers, and other programs that perform administrative tasks for the operating system. The term comes from Greek mythology, where daemons were guardian spirits.

I guess it all depends on which OS you are more familiar with.. you'll hear webservers and ftp servers refered to as httpd and ftpd.... HTTP Daemon and FTP Daemon... for HTTP.. you've got Apache or IIS... basically any server is a daemon... for FTP you've got Wu-FTPd and Guild-FTPd

Basically anything that your computer runs in the background is a daemon, like webopedia says... The Messenger Service, that so many of us b*tch about, is a daemon... crond on nix systems is the Crontab Daemon.

I hope this helps clear things up for you.. if you have any further questions.. throw em up and I'll try my best to answer them.. if I can't.. i'm sure the more knowledgeable people will be able to.

[Zonewalker]

of course if you asked this on a more esoteric site you would get the answer that a daemon is ancient greek for spirit and that this can be subdivided into kakodaemon (evil spirit) and agathodaemon (beautiful or good spirit)... further the corruption of the greek word daemon has ended up with the modern word demon which a lot of folks now use synonomously (and incorrectly) with the word devil.

the following link gives me some justification for putting this bit of info here for you

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html

important to have the historical perspective on the usuage of the word

Z

[thread_killer]

If you want to see which daemons are running on your box (well, actually there are a few ways, but this one is quick and dirty) from a terminal prompt type:

ps ax | grep d


That will give you a list to mull over for awhile.

[ammo]

FYI, "daemons" in windows are called "services". Same thing, diffrent term.

Ammo

[S3\/3|\|]

I'm a little suspicious about a few of these on my system. A few days ago, several ones that I've never seen before started running, and have been going ever since. I've tried closing them just to see if anything happened, but I was denied access to them. With names like firedaemon, I'm a little worried as to what they might be/do. Suggestions anyone?

[HTRegz]

What Is It?
FireDaemon is a utility that allows you to install and run virtually any native Win32 application or script (eg. BAT/CMD, Perl, Java, Python) as a Windows NT/2K/XP service. FireDaemon features easy configuration (via GUI or XML), a low memory/CPU overhead, subprocess prioritisation, custom environments, CPU binding plus monitoring and logging to the event log and on-disk log files.

Complete page available here

Check Program Files directory for a folder called FireDaemon (Default Install)...
You may beable to find out more information or an uninstall program there.

[EDIT]
YAY! Now I'm officially an Addict.... Time to see what's hiding in that forum
[/EDIT]

[brandon64_99]

If your looking to install a Daemon, I would suggest going with Fictional Daemon. It is a nice Daemon packed with features and it includes some nice user permissions. Good for creating telnet accounts, FTP transactions, and secure chats. Also FD is shareware.