What does the process libproxy do?

Hi,

First off I would like to apologize if this is wrong place to post this question, I am new to this forum and not 100% sure this is the right place for this question.

Let me start from the beginning. I have run into an issue I can’t find much information about - at least haven’t found a simple enough explanation to help me understand.

I have an Opensuse 11.3 server with VSFTPD installed but that program has been giving be some trouble. So I decide to see if it is running by using the command “ps -ef | grep ftp”.

The output I got was:
[username] 9946 9928 0 11:15 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/libproxy-0.4.7/pxgconf /system/proxy/mode /system/http_proxy/use_authentication /system/http_proxy/authentication_password /system/http_proxy/authentication_user /system/proxy/autoconfig_url /system/http_proxy/ignore_hosts /system/http_proxy/host /system/http_proxy/port /system/proxy/ftp_host /system/proxy/ftp_port /system/proxy/secure_host /system/proxy/secure_port /system/proxy/socks_host /system/proxy/socks_port /system/http_proxy/use_same_proxy
10233 ? 00:00:00 vsftpd
11072 ? 00:00:00 vsftpd

There are a few things I noticed about this libproxy process:

  1. All files/directories **besides ** /usr/lib/libproxy-0.4.7/pxgconf does not exist in the local drive. So why are rest of the files/directories shown above?
  2. This process doesn’t run all the time. It seems to show up when it wants to and ends when it wants to. Clearly there is a reason for this - I hope someone can explain that to me.
  3. Is anything I have shown here harmful to my system - in terms being vulnerable to outside intrusion?

Thanks,
Rocketajax.

A warm welcome here. And the place is right, libproxy is network stuff.

libproxy handles proxy requests etc, if a proxy is/becomes active. No worries.