Unix Sockets are internal communications points, they behave the same way network sockets do only they apply to the loopback adapter.
Many application suites use multiple daemons, these daemons can exist on different machines or on the same machine. For instance samba and winbind, the smbd deamon will use a unix domain socket to communicate with winbind. Mysql uses a named pipe if I'm not mistaken to communicate internally. You will see a file named mysql.sock which is essentially the same as the tcp socket socket when you get down to brass tacks. The only difference is the named pipe shows up in an ls.
Typically you want to worry about the external sockets, so you filter the netstat results to omit unix sockets if you have a lot of connections. I use these switches:
netstat -pantu inet
Gives me lots of info excluding all the socket connections for internal process communication.
--Dave
Clothes make the man, Naked people have little to no effect on society
