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Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: becoin on June 14, 2011, 01:04:12 PM



Title: What is a headless daemon?
Post by: becoin on June 14, 2011, 01:04:12 PM
I believe I know what is a daemon in computing, but what is a headless daemon? Besides bitcoind what other examples of headless daemons that are both clients and daemons we have in mass use currently?


Title: Re: What is a headless daemon?
Post by: Martin P. Hellwig on June 14, 2011, 01:27:06 PM
A daemon is a program that runs in the background usually without direct user interaction. In the windows world this is called a service.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_%28computer_software%29)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless_system:
A headless system is a computer system or device that has been configured to operate without a monitor (the missing "head"), keyboard and mouse (KVM). A headless system is typically controlled via a network connection, although some headless system devices require a connection to be made via RS232 for administration of the device.

A headless programs is one that can run on such a machine.

So joined together a headless daemon is a process running in the background not requiring any KVM resources.


Title: Re: What is a headless daemon?
Post by: Martin P. Hellwig on June 14, 2011, 02:12:17 PM
Oh and before I forget, virtually all unix daemons can be run headless. So, for example your mysql server can be counted as one (I prefer postgres if I really have to make a choice for a SQL backend, but I reckon mysql is more widely known outside the geekosphere).


Title: Re: What is a headless daemon?
Post by: Basiley on June 14, 2011, 03:11:42 PM
probably http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Buer.gif mean.