[Mimedefang] Tracking down file descriptors

[Mark Osbourne]

Kelson <kelson at speed.net> writes:

> I decided to attack it from the other end, and found something
> interesting:  I ran lsof, looking for files opened by the defang user,
> and once I filtered out all the /lib/ and /bin/ results, what remained
> were the MD socket, some pipes, connections to /dev/null.... and a TCP
> connection to the local LDAP port.  The filter doesn't use any LDAP
> features, but we authenticate against LDAP.  Something I hadn't realized
> is that every process on the system that has to deal with user accounts
> keeps an LDAP connection open.  I would expect this to be opened
> before the perl, though.

This sounds like something a co-worker found recently.  The version of
Perl we were running on Solaris would do a getspent() on startup and
then not actually use the returned data nor do an endspent(), thus
logging an error on the LDAP server.

If you're still running perl 5.6.x, it might be the problem.  You can
probably check by doing a 'perl -de 0' and then doing an lsof on the
perl process to see if it hit ldap.

Mark.