SLP Release Notes

What’s in this Version
SLP Features
Chapter 1 9
For instance, a printer can be described as a Postscript printer, a
printer that has blue paper available, or a printer on the same floor
as the user’s office. A service may be tracked by specifying the values
of the attributes. As services are replaced or taken out of service,
User Agents will discover alternate or replicated servers and
continue operation.
• Ease of Administration
Administrators do not need to help clients find new services or to
remove services when they no longer are available. As services are
replaced or taken out of service, User Agents will discover alternate
or replicated servers and continue operation.
• Ease of Development
SLP’s well defined APIs and protocol semantics allow service
developers to rapidly provide network services.
SLP Components
Basically, the SLP product consists of three components. They are:
• Service Agents (SA)
The applications that provide services, need to register information
regarding the services they provide with the service agents and
directory agents if they exist on the network.
• Directory Agents (DA)
This is a process, which collects service advertisements from the SA’s
or applications providing the services and stores them in it’s local
database. The DA can provide this service information to the clients
trying to discover this service information.
• User Agents (UA)
The SLP User Agent is a software entity that is looking for the
location of one or more services. SLP can eliminate the need for users
to know the names of network hosts. With SLP, the user only needs
to know the description of the service they are interested in. Based
on this description, SLP is then able to return the URL of the desired
service.