Thousands of sockets in /var/spool/sockets/pwgr

[Gary_O]

I noticed on one of our machines HPUX 11iv1 that there are
thousands ~8000 sockets in this directory, with
new ones being created every minute.

Are these associated with the /usr/sbin/pwgrd
process?

Can I start deleting these at will?

We do have an x.25 interface that is failing, it might be related....

I'd like to remove them all, but dont want the
machine and any "good" processes to start
dieing.

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

>>Are these associated with the /usr/sbin/pwgrd
process?

Yes, they are.

Unless you have LOTS of uses logging in and out, I would turn PWGRD off. Then you can remove the sockets.

[Gary_O]

No there aren't any users, only a couple
of administrators, including me.
Does performance degrade of a session if
the socket isn't there?

[Gary_O]

Also, we do have a lot of processes
which call getpwuid(). Would those processes
still work ok if I turned off pwgr?
Thanks

[Bill Hassell]

The purpose of the pwgrd daemon is to cache a very large password file. If it is not running, the system calls look at the passwd file directly. Stop pwgr by running the start/stop script:

/sbin/init.d/pwgr stop

You can then disable pwgrd in /etc/rc.config.d by editing the file pwgr and turning off the daemon statup:

change PWGR=1 to PWGR=0

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Gary:

I noticed the same symptom as you some time ago when I turned off the 'pwgrd' daemon by setting 'PWGR=0' in '/etc/rc/config.d/pwgr'.

It seems that the 'pwgrd' daemon cleans up old sockets in '/var/spool/sockets/pwgr' so not running it causes these files to accumulate. While as socket files these don't consume much disk space, they are needless overhead.

I suggest turning the daemon on.

Regards!

...JRF...