SUMMARY: What is the purpose of /var/esnmp?

From: Peter Chapin <pchapin_at_twilight.vtc.vsc.edu>
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 07:56:25 -0400 (EDT)

Hello again!

Thanks to following people for pointing me in the right direction.

        "Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-884-0646" <tpb_at_doctor.zk3.dec.com>
        John Speno <speno_at_isc.upenn.edu>

The sockets in /var/esnmp are created by the snmp daemon at boot
time. The daemon is extensible (hence the 'e' in the directory name)
and allows local subagents to register MIBs. See "apropos snmp" for
pointers to more information.

Although neither Tom nor John specifically mentioned this, I imagine
that only the set of sockets created at the last boot are valid. The
rest can probably be removed.

My original question follows:

> Hello!
>
> Some time ago I moved my /usr/var directory structure to a new disk
> partition and mounted that new partition under /var. I changed /usr/var to
> be a symbolic link pointing to /var to maintain compatibility with the old
> arrangement. This works fine.
>
> For backup purposes I renamed the old /usr/var to /usr/var.old. It turned
> out that this was a good thing because the method I used to copy the files
> to the new partition was such that certain permissions and attributes were
> not copied. After spending a bit of time comparing /usr/var.old with my
> new /var I was able to get that patched up fine and everything has been
> working happily for weeks.
>
> I am now at a point where I want to tar up my /usr/var.old and move it off
> the system so that I can recover its disk space. I made one last
> comparison between /var and /usr/var.old and I found an interesting thing.
> I see that the directory /usr/var.old/esnmp is full of sockets with names
> like, for example, esnmpd389, etc. These sockets were not copied properly
> and are ordinary files in my new /var. The interesting thing is that the
> files dated after my disk switching *are* sockets in /var. So it appears
> that some entity is still creating these sockets. In fact, the most recent
> ones were created a couple of weeks ago. Nothing appears to be removing
> these sockets.
>
> What is this entity that is creating these sockets? I tried "man esnmp"
> and "man esnmpd" but that didn't show me anything. Should I be cleaning
> these files out periodically?

*****************************************************************************
Peter
pchapin_at_twilight.vtc.vsc.edu http://twilight.vtc.vsc.edu/~pchapin/

"A computer can make more mistakes in two seconds than 20 people working
   20 years can make."
Received on Thu Sep 03 1998 - 11:57:27 NZST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed Nov 08 2023 - 11:53:38 NZDT