#Acceptor - TCP Listener and Connection Distributor

This daemon will listen for connections on a TCP port and distribute them to other processes. This can be used to allow non-root processes to bind privileged ports. Acceptor enables servers to scale using processes while still binding a single port (and no forking required).

#Example

Start Acceptor. Specify the port it should listen on. Specify a name for the Unix socket used to send TCP connections to other daemons.

./acceptor --port=10000 --name=acceptorTest

Start a daemon process which receives connections from acceptor, for example the included 'tester' app.

./tester --name=acceptorTest --message=SomeTestMessage

Now acceptor will pass new connections to 'tester', which will send the string "SomeTestMessage" to the client. Start a telnet session:

telnet localhost 10000
SomeTestMessage

Add another 'tester' app to have acceptor split connections between both processes:

./tester --name=acceptorTest --message=SomeOtherMessage

Start telnet sessions, watch the different messages:

telnet localhost 10000
SomeTestMessage
telnet localhost 10000
SomeOtherMessage

#Usage

--help          produce help message
--name or -n    name of the UNIX socket to bind
--host or -h    default: localhost. host to listen for tcp connections on
--port or -p    port to listen for tcp connections on
--listenBacklog or -l default: 5. backlog parameter passed to listen()

#TODO

-better load balancing (currently only supports round-robin) -possibly allow connection receivers to send messages to acceptor (keep alive, indicate how loaded they are) -mechanism for client connections to specify which backend they'd like to be passed to? routing?

#License

Public domain