The Communicator, or the Message Routing Framework, serves as the communications backbone for the Control Manager system. This component of the Trend Micro Infrastructure (TMI) handles all communication between the Control Manager server and managed products for all older Control Manager agents. They interact with older Control Manager agents to communicate with managed products.
By installing the older Control Manager agent on a managed product server, you can use this application to manage the product with Control Manager. Agents interact with the managed product and Communicator. An agent serves as the bridge between managed product and communicator. Hence, you must install agents on the same machine as managed products. There are currently only two instances where an agent must operate remotely:
Trend Micro OfficeScan Corporate Edition, installed on a NetWare server
NetScreen firewall management
MCP is installed with the managed product. It is not a separate component of the managed product, but a part of the managed product. MCP provides one-way/two-way communication between Control Manager and the managed product. MCP polls the Control Manager server for updates or commands from Control Manager. As commands for managed products are input, Control Manager holds the commands and update notifications in queue for the polling MCP.
The following diagram depicts the Control Manager Server-Communicator-Agent relationship:
Control Manager Server-Communicator-Agent Relationship
The Control Manager installation checks if the Communicator is already available on the managed product server. If so, it does not install another instance of the Communicator. Multiple agents in a product server share a single Communicator. The Communicator takes care of:
Securing messages by encryption and anti-replay functions provided by the OpenSSL open source library, and Trend Micro-developed end-to-end authentication
Receiving and relaying commands from the Control Manager server to the managed product
Receiving and relaying status information from managed products to the Control Manager server
The above descriptions highlight the following points:
TMI can exist by itself; managed products, on the other hand, cannot operate in the absence of communicator
Though there can be as many agents on a server as there are managed products, only one Communicator is required for each server
Multiple managed products can share communicator functions