Shell Programming and Scripting

Go back to the perlipc man page and look at the code for some simple servers.

A common model is to fork a new copy of the server for each incoming request. For really high performance, some architectures -- Apache being the prime example -- create forks in advance, so there's a pool of server instances waiting for incoming connections. But unless you envision hundreds or thousands of concurrent connections (in which case you are in too deep anyway), the much simpler demo daemons in the manual page should be sufficient.

Also to avoid reinventing the wheel, look at some of the demo scripts which are included with Netcat. I recall there was a simple server demo there as well.

What did u mean when u said " I am in too deep anyways" because I am actually looking for huge concurrency.

Sounds like you shouldn't be coding up something by yourself from scratch then. See if you can co-opt the Apache code base to run a server on. Probably make sense to design a protocol which resembles HTTP, or simply just use HTTP. Maybe your clients could do a simple HTTP POST to upload their reports.

era,

How do you think I can start off doing this? Can you lead me to a few pointers, please? I do not have a strong bckground this? Please help.

Regards,
garric

A basic CGI script running under Apache sounds like it should work at least for prototyping. Try something like mod_perl and/or fastcgi if it's not fast enough by itself.

The clients don't really need to run a proper browser, just a telnet to port 80 of the server to dump a POST request with the data you want from them.

Ok. But how do I get my server program to run on the apache server? How do I go about this?