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From: peter@citcom.UUCP (Peter Klosky)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Need help with SCO: the process that would not die.
Message-ID: <116@citcom.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 12:38:39 EST
Article-I.D.: citcom.116
Posted: Wed Nov 18 12:38:39 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 04:46:51 EST
Organization: Citcom Systems, Inc., Herndon, VA
Lines: 32
Keywords: ps kill process SCO xenix

We've been having some trouble killing off processes here,
and would like comments or suggestions from the net.
In specific, our PC AT running SCO XENIX 2.1.3 or 2.2 will
get itself into a state where there will be a process
which is a child of init which will not respond to a
kill request.  You can send the kill over and over, and the
process will still exist.  The signal sent is a -9, and the
process has a WCHAN and is not marked as <defunct> in the
ps output, so we are pretty sure it is not a zombie.
Of course the SCO ps does not have any symbolic information
in the WCHAN column like the better versions of ps, so we
are not able to tell what event the process is waiting on.

Our typical solution to this problem is to reboot the system.
Sadly, this destroys the evidence.  We can not reproduce this
problem on demand.  One of the programmers here suggested that
we call SCO support for help in gathering evidence; i.e. we
wanted to ask about how to take a crash dump before rebooting.
SCO responded in the usual manner for a large, insensitive
institution.  Plenty of music on hold, then a non-technical
person took our number and said someone would be calling us back
within a week or so.  Needless to say, we had to reboot the machine,
so we lost the evidence.  We did manage a "cat /dev/mem >crash.dump"
before rebooting, but we wonder how much help this will be.

Any clues on how to get a crash dump?  Any clues on why this process
would refuse to go away? (The process reads and writes message
queues, writes the console, and does file i/o.)

-- 
Peter Klosky, Citcom Systems (materiel de telecommunications)
seismo!vrdxhq!baskin!citcom!peter (703) 689-2800 x 235