Rwhod operates as both a producer and consumer of status information. As a producer of information it periodically queries the state of the system and constructs status messages which are broadcast on a network. The array at the end of the message contains information about the users logged in to the sending machine. Messages received by the rwho server are discarded unless they originated at an rwho server's port. In addition, if the host's name, as specified There should be a way to relay status information between networks.
People often interpret the server dying or network communication failures as a machine going down.