a flexible architecture
Xiscan has been designed to be as flexible as
possible. Its architecture can span one or many machines
to take full advantage of your available hardware. Xiscan
comprises two sets of components: Control Workstation and
Dial Host, organised as shown in the architecture diagram
below.
The principal architectural components are:
Control Workstation
The single machine from which Xiscan is
controlled. The Control Workstation holds the database
repository. It is also where the Configuration Manager, Xiscan
Interactive and Xiscan Command Line Interface
tools are run from
Dial Manager
The Dial Manager is the key internal component of Xiscan
Interactive and Xiscan Command Line Interface. The
Dial Manager is responsible for allocating telephone
numbers to and retrieving results from individual modems.
It does this by allocating a dedicated channel for each
modem. Communication is via that channel, through a Dial
Agent, to a specific Dial Engine.
Dial Host
A Dial Host is simply a machine to which modems are
physically attached. Dial Hosts run a web server, Dial
Agent programs and Dial Engine processes. In addition,
Dial Hosts may also be configured to run a sophisticated
analyser to perform detailed call analysis and line
identification. It is possible to co-locate all of the
Dial Host components onto the Control Workstation to
produce a single-node configuration.
Dial Agent
The Dial Agent runs as a transient CGI (Common Gateway
Interface) program. It acts as a conduit between the Dial
Manager and a specific Dial Engine, passing commands and
data in and receiving result data back. The Dial Manager
stores the returned data in the core database.
Dial Engine
When Xiscan Interactive or Xiscan Command
Line Interface is started, a Dial Engine process is
created for, and allocated to, each modem connected on a
Dial Host. Each Dial Engine process runs for the duration
of a scan (a daemon process), and is responsible for
low-level communication and management of its allocated
modem.
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