[ILUG] Unkillable processes

[Kenn Humborg]

Two nights ago, one of my linux boxes was tar-ing
some stuff onto an NT share, like:

$ smbmount //nt/share /mnt ...
$ tar cvzf /mnt/file.tgz /dir

For some reason, this job never finished.  The user
specified in the smbmount command has restricted
log-on times to the sever, so the SMB session was
probably forcibly terminated by the server before
the tar finished.

This morning, when I noticed this (because last night's
job didn't work at all), I tried to kill off the stuck
job.  However, the tar and gzip processes won't die.
The gzip is stuck in zombie (which is OK because once tar
dies, init will inherit gzip and reap it).  But the tar
process is stuck in run (state R), but isn't using any
CPU time.  This is, of course, giving me an artificially
inflated load average.

kill -9 is having no effect on this tar process.  Any ideas
on what else I could do to kill it?  Apart from rebooting,
of course.

Kernel is 2.0.36.  Some process info:

[root at cerberus bin]# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM  SIZE   RSS TTY STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     18839  0.0  1.4   988   456  ?  R   Feb 16   1:58 tar --create ...

[root at cerberus bin]# ps alx
 FLAGS   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI   SIZE   RSS WCHAN       STA TTY TIME
COMMAND
100100     0 18839     1   0   0    988   456             R   ?   1:58
tar --cre

[root at cerberus bin]# ps asx
  UID   PID SIGNAL   BLOCKED  IGNORED  CATCHED  STAT TTY   TIME COMMAND
    0 18839 00016640 00000000 2147483648 00000000 R     ?    1:58
tar --create --b


Later,
Kenn