launcher desktop allocating sockets on Fedora 41

[RebeccaMahany]

We received a report of launcher desktop allocating linux domain sockets until the system runs out of free file descriptors.

I initially investigated the monitorParentProcess loop as a culprit, which makes a request to /health every 2 seconds. However, I'm not sure this is necessarily the issue. We are making an effort to reuse connections there (see around https://github.com/kolide/launcher/blob/main/cmd/launcher/desktop.go#L291) -- and when I look with tcpdump on my own Ubuntu device, I see the connection being reused. But perhaps this is working differently on Fedora somehow?

On the affected Fedora device, I saw an interesting sequence of desktop errors that are potentially also worth investigating as a culprit:

• First,could not find xauthority in any known location, with accompanying details "wayland_location":"/run/user/1000/.mutter-Xwaylandauth.*","x11_location":"/run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority","default_location":"/home/<username>/.Xauthority".
• Then, systray error: failed to register our icon with the notifier watcher (maybe no tray is running?): The name is not activatable.
• Finally, repeated errors sending notifications:
  • could not send notification via dbus -- The name is not activatable
  • could not send notification via notify-send -- GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name is not activatable (exit status 1)

Notifications attempt to send once a minute, so this could also be frequent enough to cause the issue.

(I did see other could not find xauthority in any known location errors on different devices (specifically Arch Linux (rolling), Ubuntu 24.04, NixOS 25.11), but they are not always accompanied by the systray error or the subsequent notification errors. In one case, I saw systray error: failed to register our icon with the notifier watcher (maybe no tray is running?): The name org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher was not provided by any .service files; in two other cases, I did not see any systray errors. So, I'm not sure that the first xauthority issue is necessarily related to "The name is not activatable".)