Processes that won't die

[Lincoln Peters]

It does seem weird that something other than init would have PID 1, though.  
Could it be a bug in the kernel?  Try this:

mount -a -o remount,sync
kill -9 1 ; init q
mount -a -o remount,async

_Maybe_ that will fix it, but I don't know whether or not it is even safe 
(hence the preemptive sync remount to reduce the risk of data loss; you 
might need to modify it for your system).  If you try this, save all your 
work first!


What kind of kernel are you using?  I've noticed similar problems of undead 
processes with NFS if there were network or server problems and I didn't use 
a soft mount.

One thing you might try is:

for p in {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} ; do kill -$p $pid ; 
sleep 1 ; done

Replace $pid with the PID of the rouge process.  This will send every 
possible kill signal to the process, and hopefully one of them will actually 
kill it.  It is a little crude, but it might be worth a try.


Remember, all of these suggestions are educated guesses and they might not 
work!


>From: E Frank Ball <frankb at efball.com>
>Reply-To: <talk at nblug.org>
>To: talk at nblug.org
>Subject: Processes that won't die
>Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 11:59:28 -0800
>
>Yesterday I had hung processes on two machines that refused to die.
>Both are using RedHat 6.2.  Machine one had a couple of netscape
>processes left after netscape died.  Restarting netscape resulted in
>another hang and two more processes that wouldn't die.  The other was an
>application we use at work.  machine two (output of 'ps -ef | grep rmb'):
>
>yellowst  3556     1  2 Nov09 ?        01:07:24 rmb -title 
>YELLOWSTONE_SYSTEM_CO
>yellowst  3581  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:01 [rmbkbdx <defunct>]
>yellowst  3582  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:00 [rmbhil <defunct>]
>yellowst  3583  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:00 [rmbtmr <defunct>]
>yellowst  3741  3556  0 Nov09 ?        00:00:10 [rmb_pipe.3556 <defunct>]
>
>The nescape processes looked similar.  The top level process had a PPID
>of 1 (init), the child processes were zombies.  kill -9 by either the
>process owner or root had no effect.  Both machines had to be rebooted.
>
>There must be a better way.  Any advice?
>
>Thanks,
>
>--
>
>    E Frank Ball                efball at efball.com
>    work: (707) 794-4168        home: (707) 538-3693


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