Starting the Daemon

The wrspiced program command line has the following form:

wrspiced [-fg] [-l logfile] [-p program] [-m maxjobs] [-t port]

There are five optional arguments.

-fg
If given, the wrspiced program will remain in the foreground (i.e., not become a ``daemon''), but will service requests normally. This may be useful for debugging purposes.

-l logfile
The logfile is a path to a file that will receive status messages from wrspiced. The default is the value of the SPICE_DAEMONLOG environment variable if set when the program is started, or /tmp/wrspiced.log.

-p program
This specifies the WRspice program to run, in case for some reason the wrspice binary has been renamed, or wrspice is not in the expected location. This overrides the values of the SPICE_PATH and SPICE_EXEC_DIR environment variables, which can also be used to set the path to the binary. The default is ``/usr/local/xictools/bin/wrspice''.

-m maxjobs
This sets the maximum number of jobs that the server will allow to be running at the same time. The default is 5.

-t port
This sets the port to be used by the daemon, and overrides any port set in the services database. Clients must use the same port number to connect to the SPICE server.

The daemon is started by simply typing the command. If a machine is to operate continuously as a SPICE server, it is recommended that the wrspiced daemon be started in the system initialization scripts. The daemon will run until explicitly killed by a signal, or the machine is halted. When the wrspiced process terminates, any WRspice processes under management will also be killed. The daemon can be terminated, by the process owner, by giving the command ``ps aux | grep wrspiced'' and noting the process id (pid) number of the running wrspiced process, and then issuing ``kill pid'' using this pid number.

It may be necessary to become root before starting wrspiced, as on some systems connection to the port will otherwise be refused due to permission requirements. Starting by root is also required if the log file is to be written to a directory such as /var/log that requires root permission for writing.