[wplug] processes that won't die

[Poyner, Brandon]

That is usually caused by the process waiting on I/O from the hardware
device.  I suspect if you ran ps you would see that the process state
would be 'D', an uninterruptible sleep (i.e.: will not respond to a kill
signal).  I usually see that on SCSI devices but it's certainly not
unique to SCSI.  If you could reset the device you should be fine, say
if the CD-rom drive were external.  

Brandon Poyner
Network Engineer II
CCAC - College Office
412-237-3086


-----Original Message-----
From: Russ Schneider [mailto:russ at sugapablo.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 3:11 PM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: [wplug] processes that won't die


Once in a while, my CD-ROM goes dead.  You press the eject button and 
you hear a sound, like it's about ready to eject, but it doesn't.

99% of the time, if I type eject /mnt/cdrom, it opens just fine and 
there's no problem.

But occasionally, like just a minute ago, i'll type eject and it will 
just hang there.  In fact, every 2 minutes or so, the computer will hang

for a three count.

I try to kill the eject process, and even with -9, it won't die.

I looked at the parent pid and notices it was 1 or init.

Now, sometimes when a process won't die, I kill the parent and it's ok. 
  Usually, that parent simply turns out to be bash or something.

But the direct parent of a command i typed turned out to be 1 (init). 
I'm not certain what it will do, but I don't think I should be trying a 
kill -9 1.

Can anybody shed any light on this?  Only thing I knew to do was to 
reboot (I'm so ashamed).  It fixes it.  In fact, you can actually hear 
the CD-ROM reset when it reboots.

Specs: Dell Dimension 8100, Mandrake 9.1.



-- 
[ Russ Schneider (a.k.a. Sugapablo)     ]
[ http://www.sugapablo.com <--music     ]
[ http://www.sugapablo.net <--personal  ]
[ sugapablo at 12jabber.com   <--jabber IM ]

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