I am interested in developing some services for NetBSD and Unix in 
general and I was wondering where to start reading  up on the various 
mechanisms that I can use to do this. I am having some trouble finding 
useful information on the 'net - probably because I don't know what 
magic phrases to search for.

What I am interested in doing is having some programs that monitor 
various pieces of hardware, process the data, and make the data 
available to other programs, either remote or local or both. I figure 
each step is going to have several different ways to accomplish the goal.

Here are some of the topics I am interested in:

Services - how to write them for easy start/stop/restart/config
Shared memory/pipes - how to move data between separate programs
Crashdumps - how to generate them so i can get useful info out of a 
failed program

I'm not a unix developer, but i have written C/C++ code for VxWorks, and 
(gasp) Windows. I really need to get up to speed on the Unix way of 
doing some of these things, and I just need a push in the right 
direction. I know this is a pretty broad request, but all I'm looking 
for is Google food. If you have any links for the above or any other 
topics that you think would be useful for my goals, I would appreciate them.

Thank you,


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Brian