Net8 Overview

Net8 is the foundation of the Oracle family of networking products, allowing services and their applications to reside on different computers and communicate as peer applications. The main function of Net8 is to establish network sessions and transfer data between a client machine and a server or between two servers. Net8 is located on each machine in the network. Once a network session is established, Net8 acts as a data courier for the client and the server.

The following figure depicts a client-to-server connection:

Network sessions are established with the help of a listener. The listener is a separate process that resides on the server. The listener receives incoming client connection requests and manages the traffic of these requests to the server.

The listener brokers the client request, handing off the request to the server. Every time a client (or server acting as a client) requests a network session with a server, a listener receives the actual request. If the client's information matches the listener's information, the listener grants a connection to the server.