When nFoldMan is running a Folding process on its local machine, you can optionally "publish" this process -- meaning make its status information, and possibly its controls, available to other nFoldMan applications on the network.
When nFoldMan is running a Folding process on its local machine, you can optionally "publish" this process -- meaning make its status information, and possibly its controls, available to other nFoldMan applications on the network.
In the diagram above, the document on computer "A" must be published before it can be monitored remotely from computer "B". Set up the document and its process in the normal way, then select "Edit Process Settings" and click the "Publish" tab:
Turn on the "make self available for remote monitoring" checkbox. The remote program will only be able to see the status of your process. If you also want the remote program to be able to start, stop, and pause your process, select "and allow remote control" too.
Enter a name for this process in the text field. This name is used by the remote monitoring program to select this process from among those that might be running on the machine. It can be any text, but it must be unique on this machine. (It need not be unique from other machines.)
Also, go into nFoldMan's Preferences and make sure there is a password specified:
On the machine from which you wish to monitor (machine "B" in the diagram above), start nFoldMan and create a new document. Click the radio button to the left of the "Network Connection" area:
If you know the address and process name information for the remote process, you can just type them in. However, it is easier and less error-prone to use Rendezvous to get this information from the network. Click the "Browse Network button to open the Rendezvous browser:
In the left window is a list of the computers on your local network who are publishing any folding processes. Click one. Then, on the right, a list of the published processes will appear. Click the one you wish to monitor and click OK. You will be returned to the settings pane:
The computer name and process name have now been filled in for you. Type the password of the remote document ("abra" in the example we used above) and click "OK".
You will end up with a normal process status window:
This window looks and behaves just like any other, except that the process it describes is on a different computer. Obviously if the other computer or the network go down, you will lose the ability to monitor or control that process.
Monitoring over the Internet works, but Rendezvous doesn't. So, to monitor a process across the Internet you must:
- Know the IP address or Domain Name of the remote machine, and enter it manually.
- Set up any firewalls or network address translation (NAT) devices between you and the remote computer to pass traffic on the port specified in the Preferences.
- Possibly increase the connection timeout specified in the Preferences.
Be sure to use a password to protect published processes, especially if your machine is accessible from the Internet. Passwords are sent encrypted over the network; nevertheless, it is not good practice to use the same password as you use for other purposes, so if it happens to be compromised the damage is limited.
Also, don't enable the "allow control" option unless you really need your processes to be controllable by the remote machine. In most cases monitoring should be enough privilege for the remote machine.
There are a lot of things that can fail in inter-machine networked communication. If you are having trouble, it is worth leaving the Console program running for a while. nFoldMan produces console messages when it encounters various error conditions, and these may help you to track a problem.
Here are a few potential problem areas to watch out for:
- Be sure to keep your copies of nFoldMan at the same version. A version upgrade may change the format of the inter-process messaging, and it's important that both parties be running the same version.
- Be careful if you use dial-up networking. nFoldMan makes no attempt to interact with your dialer. If it is set to dial automatically at need, then every time nFoldMan tries to check the status of a remote process, your dialer will connect you to the internet. This may be quite frequently, and may essentially result in you being permanently connected. I really intended nFoldMan for machines with a permanent, non-dialed network connection.
- Mac OS X version 10.3 still has a known bug in its networking software. If you close a network port and then try to re-open it quickly, this will sometimes fail. The effect you would see is that an attempt to rapidly quit and restart nFoldMan, or to rapidly change the publication status of a document, or to rapidly close and re-open a remote document, might fail. nFoldMan will recognize this condition and will automatically re-try the connection if it believes you are encountering this bug.
