[ILUG] Unkillable processes

[Donncha O Caoimh]

I had the exact same problem about a year ago you might remember. Had a
nice uptime on the machine too :(
Anyway, people suggested going into single user mode and various other
fixes to no avail, all I could do was reboot..

Donncha


Kenn Humborg wrote:
> 
> 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.