About the X Font Server

The X Font Server is a simple TCP/IP-based service that serves font files to its clients. Clients connect to the server to request a font set, and the server reads the font files off the disk and serves them to the clients. The X Font Server daemon consists of a server binary /usr/openwin/bin/xfs. The daemon is normally started from inetd, however, for the current sample, assume that the appropriate entry in the /etc/inetd.conf file has been disabled (for example, by the fsadmin -d command) so the daemon is under sole control of Sun Cluster.

The next section describes the X Font Server configuration file.

The Configuration File

By default, the X Font Server reads its configuration information from the file, /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fontserver.cfg. The catalog entry in this file contains a list of font directories available to the daemon for serving. The cluster administrator can locate the font directories on the global file system (to optimize the use of the X Font Server on Sun Cluster by maintaining a single copy of the font's database on the system). If so, the administrator must edit fontserver.cfg to reflect the new paths for the font directories.

For ease of configuration, the administrator can also place the configuration file itself on the global file system. The xfs daemon provides command line arguments to override the default, built-in location of this file. The SUNW.xfnts resource type uses the following command to start the daemon under control of Sun Cluster.

/usr/openwin/bin/xfs -config <location_of_cfg_file>/fontserver.cfg \
-port <portnumber>

In the SUNW.xfnts resource type implementation, you can use the Confdir_list property to manage the location of the fontserver.cfg configuration file.

The TCP Port Number

The TCP port number on which the xfs server daemon listens is normally the “fs” port (typically defined as 7100 in the /etc/services file). However, the -port option on the xfs command line enables the system administrator to override the default setting. You can use the Port_list property in the SUNW.xfnts resource type to set the default value and to support the use of the -port option on the xfs command line. You define the default value of this property as 7100/tcp in the RTR file. In the SUNW.xfnts Start method, you pass Port_list to the -port option on the xfs command line. Consequently, a user of this resource type isn't required to specify a port number—the port defaults to 7100/tcp—but does have the option of specifying a different port if they wish when configuring the resource type, by specifying a different value for the Port_list property.