Chapter 12. Running Network Services
A network service is a program running on a local machine that other machines can connect to and use over a network. Common examples include web, email, and file-transfer servers.
This chapter builds on the network administration fundamentals covered in Chapter 10 to describe how network services work in general, and how several of the more popular services work on Mac OS X. For information on using these services client-side, consult Chapter 8.
Network Services Overview
Generally, a network service operates through a
daemon program that listens for incoming
connections on a certain port; web servers usually listen on port 80,
for example, and ssh
connections typically
happen on port 22. (The precise way it accomplishes this is
implementation-specific; it might choose to handle the whole
connection itself or fork off another process to handle it so the
daemon can get back to listening.)
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