gconf: how does it work?

From: Andy Haupt (andyhaupt_at_netscape.net)
Date: 11/24/04 

Date: 24 Nov 2004 10:23:27 -0800

Hello all,

I was trying to understand how gconf works and it is very puzzling to
me as a newbie to Linux and its modules.

How does gconfd know that it is running on another machine and how
does it get in contact with its equivalent on another machine?

Scenario:
I'm logged into my machineA via Gnome, I start mozilla and a gconfd-2
process is running as it should .
I'm telnetting into machineB and start gconfd-2 manually wia strace.
the strace output shows that this gconfd-2 somehow talks to machine1
via sockets and using some /var/tmp/orbit.... stuff too.
When I start mozilla on machineB this results in machineA's mozilla to
open a secondary window ie. it seems that the mozilla process on
machineB knows about the mozilla on machineA via gconfd. (I would want
though to have mozilla on machineB independent of machineA).

So how did the 2 gconfd-2 processes get in contact?
is this via entries in $HOME/.gconfd ?
on machineB I tried to trick gconfd-2 by setting HOME to something
different than my real home dir but this did not change the behaviour,
gconfd-2 still did know about my real HOME and its subdir .gconfd.

rgds
andreas