20 and extracts the information necessary to establish a communications session with the server node through communications interface 28 the interrupt service 24 establishes a network link 30 with server node communications interface 32 a server node manager 34 process either executes continuously looking for incoming communications or is awakened when an incoming communication is received by the communications interface 32 the interrupt service 24 sends the unique process identifier of the agent process 18 to the server node manager 34 after the link 30 is established when the server node manager 34 has received the agent process 18 unique identifier the communications link 30 is closed by either the server node manager 34 or the interrupt service 24 according to the appropriate network protocol the server node manager 34 causes a server node interrupt server 36 to execute the interrupt service 36 raises an interrupt request flag in the control block 22 to signal that an interrupt request is pending if the server node is operating under the operating system os 2 available from ibm the server node manager 34 can use a dosflagprocess operation to flag the agent process 18 this invokes a predetermined function in the agent process 18 which handles the interrupt as if it were interrupting a locally running application by invoking the interrupt service 36 the agent process 18 during execution periodically polls the interrupt request flag and the control block 22 when a raised interrupt request flag is detected the module within the agent process 18 which detects the flag stops execution and returns a special return code to its caller this return code indicating that an interrupt has been received continues to be passed.