slp(7P) Protocols slp(7P)NAMEslp - Service Location Protocol
DESCRIPTION
The Service Location Protocol (SLP) is a dynamic service discovery pro‐
tocol that runs on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol is
specified by the IETF standard-track documents RFC 2165, RFC 2608, RFC
2609; the API is documented in RFC 2614. .
There are two components to the SLP technology. The first is a daemon,
slpd(1M), which coordinates SLP operations. The second is a software
library, slp_api(3slp), through which processes access a public API.
Both components are configured by means of the SLP configuration file,
slp.conf(4).
The SLP API is useful for two types of processes:
Client Applications Services and service information can be
requested from the API. Clients do not need to
know the location of a required service, only
the type of service, and optionally, the ser‐
vice characteristics. SLP will supply the
location and other information to the client
through the API.
Server Processes Programs that offer network services use the
SLP API to advertise their location as well as
other service information. The advertisement
can optionally include attributes describing
the service. Advertisements are accompanied by
a lifetime; when the lifetime expires, the
advertisement is flushed, unless it is
refreshed prior to expiration.
API libraries are available for both the C and Java languages.
SLP provides the following additional features:
· slpd(1M) can be configured to function as a transparent directory
agent. This feature makes SLP scalable to the enterprise. System
administrators can configure directory agents to achieve a number
of different strategies for scalability.
· SLP service advertising and discovery is performed in scopes.
Unless otherwise configured, all discovery and all advertisements
are in the scope default. In the case of a larger network, scopes
can be used to group services and client systems so that users
will only find those services which are physically near them,
belong to their department, or satisfy the specified criteria.
Administrators can configure these scopes to achieve different
service provider strategies.
· Services may be registered by proxy through a serialized registra‐
tion file. This is an alternative to registering services through
the API. See slpd.reg(4) for more information.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5)
for descriptions of the following attributes:
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ ATTRIBUTE TYPE │ ATTRIBUTE VALUE │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Availability │SUNWslpu │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│CSI │CSI-enabled │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Interface Stability │Standard │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│MT-Level │MT-Safe │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
SEE ALSOslpd(1m), slp_api(3slp), slp.conf(4), slpd.reg(4), attributes(5)
Guttman, E., Perkins, C., Veizades, J., and Day, M., RFC 2608, Service
Location Protocol, Version 2, The Internet Society, June 1999.
Guttman, E., Perkins, C., and Kempf, J., RFC 2609, Service Templates
and Service: Schemes, The Internet Society, June 1999.
Kempf, J. and Guttman, E., RFC 2614, An API for Service Location, The
Internet Society, June 1999.
Veizades, J., Guttman, E., Perkins, C., and Kaplan, S., RFC 2165, Ser‐
vice Location Protocol, Network Working Group, 1997.
SunOS 5.10 17 Nov 1999 slp(7P)
