View source for Slave

A [[slave]] process is spawned by the game's main server process for delegating potentially time-consuming tasks. The communication between these two processes it typically some form of Unix pipe or socket.

[[PennMUSH]] and [[TinyMUX]] use the slave process to handle [[reverse-DNS]] lookups and [[Ident]] lookups for the purpose of identifying the connecting user. Depending on what information can be gleaned (and whether the MUSH server is running on Windows), this information is available to the Wizard-flagged staff on the wizard-[[WHO]] in one of several forms as follows:

<pre>
Player Name        On For Idle   Room    Cmds   Host
Prism1               0:26  57s   #1269      2   127.0.0.1
Prism2               0:27  56s   #1270      3   dnsname.com
Prism3               0:28  55s   #1271      4   COMPUTERNAME
Prism4               0:29  54s   #1272      5   user@127.0.0.1
Prism5               0:30  53s   #1273      6   user@dnsname.com
</pre>

It is also available to the player via the [[@last]] command, the [[lastsite]] attribute, and the [[lastip]] attribute.

== Server Differences ==

[[PennMUSH]] calls its slave process ''info_slave'', and uses it for both [[reverse-DNS]] lookups and [[Ident]] lookups. It limits itself to 5 simultaneous lookups. It does not provide an in-game command to restart the slave. However, if the process exits for some reason, it is detected and automatically restarted. info_slave is not supported on Windows. On that OS, lookups are done synchronously in the main process.

[[TinyMUX]] calls its slave process ''slave'', and uses it for both [[reverse-DNS]] lookups and [[Ident]] lookups. Currently, the Unix version of [[TinyMUX]]'s slave limits itself to 20 simultaneous lookups. If the slave terminates for some reason, [[@startslave]] can be used to start it again. The Win32 version of [[TinyMUX]] does not use a separate slave process. Instead, it relies on five background threads with the main game process to accomplish the same work.