DESCRIPTION

The Server file retriever allows agents running on some remote system to ask their server to provide them access to a file. If the server is willing to serve it the file the actual file retriever is then run on the server side with the server retriever on the agent side forwarding any request to it.

The server retriever is not associated with any special URI. Every retriever URI can be forwarded to a server.

The server retriever is normally the retriever that is tried if every other retriever is unwilling to perform given a specific URI.

Case

A commonly used case is: The agent performs some task and the results of this task are written into a file on the server side. In this case the URI of the output file is normally file://masterhost/tmp/sometempfile where of course masterhost must be replaced by the actual name of the Director server system. The file retriever on the agent side will refuse to serve the file because the host name of the agent system does not match the host name in the URI. Since no other retriever will serve the file neither, the server retriever will be invoked as a last resort. It will forward the request to the server. The server will try to find a retriever for the URI. On the server side the file retriever accepts the URI since the host names match and the agent therefore can write to the file using the server retriever and the Director server as a proxy.