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Description of gnatsd

The gnatsd network daemon is used to service remote GNATS requests such as querying PRs, PR creation, deletion, and editing, and miscellaneous database queries. It uses a simple ASCII-based command protocol (similar to SMTP or POP3) for communicating with remote clients.

It also provides a security model based either on IP-based authentication (generally considered very weak) or username/passwords, where passwords may be in cleartext, UNIX crypt or MD5 hash format. Access through gnatsd is granted according to certain predefined access levels. Access levels are further discussed in Controlling access to databases. It should be emphasized that security has not been a focus of development until now, but future versions are expected to address this more thoroughly.

All of the GNATS clients are capable of communicating via the GNATS remote protocol to perform their functions.

gnatsd is usually started from the inetd facility and should run as the gnats user (the actual username of this user is configurable during installation, see Configuring and compiling the software for details.)