Odyssey Connect Directory

The Odyssey connect directory contains the FIFOs used to communicate between the gateway adapters (OdysseyAdapter) and the JVMs (OdysseyJavaCode).

Two groups of files may exist in this directory. The first is persistent files which come in pairs, with filenames ending .fifo (actually a FIFO) and .lock (an empty plain file). The second is transient files, which should disappear as soon as the corresponding request has completed. The transient files should actually be FIFOs, although they have been observed to be plain files on occasion. Best guess as to why this occurs is that the Java process which is supposed to write to them creates them as plain files if they do not exist.

The persistent files are created whenever necessary, and remain there indefinitely. This is not a real problem because they are just pipes and empty files, and there are at most about two per user. The transient files are meant to be deleted by the process that is waiting on them, but if the process is killed then this may not occur. If the process corresponding to a transient file is still active, then catting /dev/null to the transient file will cause it to delete the file and terminate. If not, then the transient file should be deleted by another means.

Since the connect directory is primarily used by the adapters, more details are at OdysseyAdapter.

-- IsaacMorland - 22 Jan 2007