The mysterious "net" background process (Mac OS X 10.5.8)

[rbaibich]

My processor usage was going through the roof, so I went to check what was going on. I found a background process called "net" that was running at almost 100%. It's owned by root, and I couldn't find any information about it.

Here's the screenshot of it:

Does anyone know what the hell is this?

 

[ViRGE]

It would help if you could find the exact location of the executable. I'm not sure if Activity Monitor does that (I'm not on my mac ATM), you may have to do sudo ps -ax in the console.

 

[alfa147x]

I don't see a process named that on mine, what are you running?

 

[Kmax82]

Yea.. I'm on 10.6 so maybe that's the difference.. but no process for that on mine either.

 

[rbaibich]

/usr/bin/net -W BOULDER -P ads dns register

"BOULDER" is the name of the office server here. It might be related to their remote management tool - Casper. I killed the process but it comes back on its own after a while. There's probably another process launching it automatically.

Today I got another one that's just as hungry as the first: /usr/sbin/nmbd -F.

Checking with IT here, but I'm curious what the hell is generating those processes.

 

[Nothinman]

Both of those binaries are part of Samba. The net command is attempting to add a DNS entry for itself to the DC in the BOULDER domain. And nmbd is the NetBIOS resolution daemon for Samba.

Looking at the man page for either command would've answered that.