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From: braun@drivax.UUCP (Kral)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Killing the printer daemon
Message-ID: <2419@drivax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 21-Sep-87 13:39:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: drivax.2419
Posted: Mon Sep 21 13:39:38 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Sep-87 07:07:28 EDT
Reply-To: braun@drivax.UUCP (Kral)
Organization: Digital Research, Inc.
Lines: 33



I posted this once before about 3 or 4 months ago, and never really got an
answer to it, so I'm going to try one more time.  Surely this isn't unique
to my system, and surely someone has found a way around it.

The problem is in killing the line printer daemon when one of the printers has
gone off line.

The particular situation arises when the system automatically comes down for
weekly backups (no discussions on the merits of single vs multi, stand alone vs
live backups, please).  Last weekend, while testing a new version of the
scripts, one of the printers was offline and still had a couple of jobs
scheduled for it.  My script attempted to fix this situation by performing
'/etc/lpc abort all' before bringing the system down.  The command reports that
it is killing the daemon (both when run from the take-down script, and when run
manually).  But when shutdown occurrs, I get the "something won't die" message,
and /usr won't unmount.  

After rebooting and recreating the situation, I tried to kill the daemon
manually with kill -9.  It just won't die.  So what's an admin to do?

(I just can NOT believe an operating system with this much development
experience behind it can't kill a process, even one waiting on I/O).



System:
	Vax 11/780, Berkeley Unix 4.2, RP07, RM03, No Network.
-- 
kral		408/647-6112		...{ism780|amdahl}!drivax!braun
"Dream lightyears...    Challenge miles...    Walk in steps"
DISCLAIMER: If DRI knew I was saying this stuff, they would shut me d~-~oxx