When the open call (fopen or open) is made, a MSRPC call to the directory server is first made, with the appropriate access mode, file types etc parameters. It locates the WDFS directory server by obtaining its address from the environment variable WDDS Any number of alternative directory servers can be listed in this variable. The format is:
The format is:
Where h
is the 
octet in
internet dotted notation of the MSNL address of host h
.
No assumption should be made on the selection of the current directory
server from the WDDS environment variable.
Monitoring tool wdfs_ping and wdds_ping are for checking the state of the the wdfs and wdds daemon respectively.
The usage of the corresponding Unix tool is:
wdfs_ping [-c] server_name
wdds_ping [-c] server_name
If -c option is used, the tool does continuous pinging of the daemon via the NULL procedure of the MSRPC interface.