5.1 The ensembleDeamon

In order to run any distributed BETA program, a network host must run an instance of the ensembleDeamon executable. This deamon implements the NameServer (ensemble.ns) functionality of the ensemble as well as being responsible for generating world-wide unique object ID's for distributed BETA objects created on the host on which the deamon is running.

The ensembleDeamon is installed by running the startensemble script, residing in BETALIB/bin/startensemble. The ~beta/bin directory should be in the path of all BETA users. The startensemble script simply executes the correct ensembleDeamon executable for the current hardware and operating system platform ^[9].

The ensembleDeamon has no network security critical responsibilities and has no need for super user privileges. Therefore it makes no difference what user starts the deamon. However, like other deamons ensembleDeamon might as well be installed by init when the operating system is bootet.

Section 11 contains a complete distributed BETA program that may be used to check whether an ensemble is already running on some network host.