Can someone set me straight, I run netstat on my RH system, I get about 40 (maybe more, maybe less) unix sockets. Of course a few UDP and a few TCP ports listening, but i recently test drove a dedicated server from an ISP and their netstat had so few unix sockets. These annoy me, are they a security risk? Are they just for kernal interprocess communication ? Whats the deal?

thanks!

sopiaz57,

Try running "netstat -p" as root. This will tell you which programs are using the sockets. There probably aren't any security issues, but you probably should know what is running on your system. The unix domain sockets (man 7 unix) are used for local InterProcess Communication (IPC). Some unix sockets are anonymous, and others actually live on the filesystem (and protected by the normal unix file permissions). It is used by many programs, so hopefully they don't annoy you too much

Postfix, for instance, uses the unix domain sockets to communicate to it's various processes. It has 39 sockets just for the master program on my system. syslogd listens on the /dev/log socket, for an example of named sockets. Try using netstat --inet to see the only TCP/UDP stuff.

Have fun,
chris