Sockets in /dev: what are they? how to recreate them?

[Steven Winikoff]

Being fortunate enough to have "spare" partition on one of our disks,
I'm backing up my root partition (on a DECsystem 5500 under Ultrix 4.1)
to disk, using afio (since the Ultrix cpio is broken, but that's
another story).

My question concerns the following three items in /dev:

               /root.bak/dev/snmp
               /root.bak/dev/elcscntlsckt
               /root.bak/dev/printer

These are all sockets, and I can't copy them using afio/cpio or tar.

That's all I know about them.

Obviously I'd like to know what's happening here.  What are these
files?  How are they created?  Can I back them up?  If not, can I
recreate them in my spare partition?

Thanks in advance,

   - Steven

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Winikoff                                 smw at alcor.concordia.ca
Software Analyst
Dept. of Computing Services
Concordia University                            voice: (514) 848-7619
Montreal, Quebec, Canada                               (10:00-18:00 EST)