SLP Release Notes

What’s in this Version

SLP Features

Chapter 1 11

slp daemon

slpd provides the Service Agent and the Directory Agent functionality

along with the ability to maintain a consistent state with respect to the

locations of other SLP agents on the network. The SLP library (libslp.sl)

provides UA functionality internally on a per process basis without the

need to communicate with slpd running on local machines. This means

that in certain cases, the slp daemon does not always have to be loaded

on every machine. This helps to minimize the overhead for SLP for those

machines that will only need UA capabilities.

slpd must be running on all machines that will be registering services.

In other words, slpd is required on all machines that run applications

and make calls to one of the following SLP APIs: SLPReg(), SLPDeReg().

slpd is the process that accepts registration requests for services from

Service Agents and maintains this information internally. It then

provides this service information to the clients UA’s when queried. slpd

also allows older applications which are not SLP-enabled to advertise the

services. An option is provided to specify the ﬁle which contains the

static registrations. By defaults it reads static registrations from the

/etc/slp.reg ﬁle. If you expect the registrations for this ﬁle to be

available to other machines, you must run slpd. slpd is required for

automatic DA and scope discovery to work correctly. If you do not run

slpd, then DA’s and scopes can only be discovered via DHCP or the

/etc/slp.conf ﬁle.

NOTE Due to lack of a standard DHCP API, DA discovery via DHCP is not yet

supported.

slpd is not needed if a machine will only be requesting services. In other

words, slpd does is not required on machines if a call will never be made

to SLPReg(), SLPDeReg(). slpd is not needed on a machine if manual or

DHCP DA or scope discovery is sufﬁcient.

Conﬁguring SLP

The options required for conﬁguring slp daemon "slpd" are provided

through a conﬁguration ﬁle. By default /etc/slp.conf is the

conﬁguration ﬁle used by SA and DA. These options basically include: