Anetd has been designed to require minimal modifications to traditional networking applications in order to deploy them.
The only general requirement is that the applications must be fairly encapsulated and do not have many dependencies (e.g. do not require a large number of specific shared libraries that are not commonly available). Anetd supports the deployment of resources needed by the applications to facilitate the porting of existing software, but Anetd is not intended to be used to deploy a large number of libraries or large portions of installation directories. In these cases, it is advisable to use standard manual installation methodologies or bundle the required resources with Anetd in advance.
Anetd demultiplexing uses the standard input of the deployed service for forwarding packets to it. In other words, as explained below, an application wanting to receive traffic demultiplexed by Anetd coming from an ANEP port must read its input stream from standard input. This is accomplished as follows: once a new application with an ANEP type assigned to it is deployed, Anetd adds the type ID to a demultiplexing table. The demultiplexing table maps an ANEP type ID to a file descriptor; the file descriptor, in turn, maps to the standard input of the application. Application output streams do not require any support from Anetd and can allow the system to assign output ports automatically.0