a singleton implementation for network connectivity in the rjvm layer this restriction forces the server to only communicate over a single nic all traffic in the same qos level e g t3 http and iiop must share a single port to take advantage of the hardware resources such as multi homed configuration application servers developed in accordance with the invention do not suffer from these limitations in accordance with the invention a new layer beneath rjvm is added to take advantage of the multi homed configuration by allowing controlled communication over multiple nics and allowing protocols to share or exclusively own one or more naps multiple servers can be deployed in a cluster on a single ip machine by using different parts for each server a server is like a location off of a highway a u201c channel u201d can be thought of as a highway and a u201c network access point u201d nap as an on ramp on that highway to link two locations they both need to share a channel a nap is optional and is used by a server to over ride channel settings on a per server basis a server may access multiple channels and multiple naps no two naps on the same server may refer to the same channel for interoperability reasons the network related fields from previous versions continue to be supported in this document these legacy fields are referred to as the u201c default channel u201d and the u201c default admin channel u201d fig1 shows an example of a multiple channel configuration in accordance with an embodiment of the invention in the example shown in fig1 a plurality of servers server 1 server 2 and server 3 are shown communicating with one another.