dsmd is Service Manager and it is a part of Daemon Manager. It is a daemon process which works all the time the system is running and it takes care of all specified daemons of David system that they were run. The specification of the daemons managed by dsmd is made in its configuration file. During the daemon work its client dsc can change a part of the settings.

During its startup dsmd reads its configuration file .dsmdrc. The program expects to find it in a directory pointed by the variable confdir in the file /etc/david-system.conf. The daemon dsmd won't be run if it can't read its configuration from .dsmdrc file.