Re: [UUG/MLUG] Server Problem - Please Help

[James Williams <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Keith Kleiner wrote:

> Uh, when you say restarting the server, I guess you just restarted the
> httpd server or something, but not the entire machine.  Assuming this,
> then I suppose the files are still being held open because the processes
> became zombies and were then picked up by init.  Is it possible to restart
> init without restarting the machine, or just to tell it to kill some of
> its children?

No, zombie processes should never be picked up by init.  A zombie process
is a process that has terminated, but its termination hasn't been
acknoledged by its parent.  If you kill the parent, the zombie process
goes away.  I don't know if a zombie process can hold a lock or not, but
it's possible pine or whichever program is causing problems is using a
lock file, and the file still exists (processes creating lock files should
also create a read or write lock on the file, so if the process terminates
abnormally, the read/write lock will be removed, even though the lock file
will still exist.  Unfortunately, not all programs do this.  I don't know
if pine does or not).

To the original poster: log into the machine as the user who ran the
script that ran amuck and enter this:

ps xa | cut -f1 -d" " | xargs kill -9

Do *NOT* run this as root.  I repeat - DO **NOT** RUN THIS AS ROOT.  This
will attempt to kill all processes on the system, but because of the
permissions, will only the processes owned by the controlling user.

If this still doesn't work, or if the script was run as root, try looking
through your /proc filesystem.  Each one of the numbered directories
represents a process, and each process directory has a directory called
"fd".  Try looking through these to see if you can find a process that has
a *lot* (thousands) of open files, and kill it (make sure you know what
you are killing first, though). 

It may also be some wierd problem with a lock file.  Check out your
/var/lock directory to see if you can find anything suspicious.

BTW, the only way to restart init is to reboot.  You can, however, tell
it to re-read its configuration file with "init q".

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