Hello. I have recently completely reinstalled one of our server machines
and everything is running great.

I noticed something odd though. Sometimes if I do 'netstat -tunp', there
are a couple of process whose name does not show.

For example:

tcp 0 0 192.168.0.4:139 192.168.0.2:4240
ESTABLISHED 23657/

which happens to be smbd (samba) :

# ps aux | grep 23657 | grep -v grep
root 23657 0.0 0.4 6228 1040 ? S Feb12 0:00 [smbd]


I also notice there are square braces ([...]) around the process name.
Does this mean anything?

This also happens with named, even after updating it form 9.2.1 (redhat
default) to 9.3.4 (the version we currently use on our servers, soon to
be upgraded to a newer build.)

The processes themselves run perfectly fine, so this seems like more of
a cosmetic issue - and screwing with some scripts we have that grep such
lists using a process name - but I want to know if it could be wrong
elsewhere in the system (which otherwise is running like a well oiled
machine - yay linux.)

And restarting any of these process doesn't change this, though I have
not tried restarting the machine since noticing this. This machine is
also a mail server so it's not restarted unless it's really needed.


Thanks greatly for any insight on this.



# uname -srvmpio
Linux 2.4.20-8 #1 Thu Mar 13 17:54:28 EST 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Linux release 9 (Shrike)


(Note to self, update/recompile the kernel. The previous box which died
actually had a newer kernel despite being a RH 7.3 machine.)

--
szr