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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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