Re: Zombie users

David Levine wrote: > "G'khan Tercan" wrote in message <698de5$7i6@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu>... > > > >...but when I try to kill the user's pid with kill -9, SCO gives me "no > such > >process". > >This causes many zombie users and eventually this causes a very slow > >system. > > I've seen this exact situation. The users that you see from 'who -u' are > appearing because they are in the /etc/utmp and /etc/wtmp files. This > condition does not, in my experience, cause a slowdown in the system. > Uhmm, these aren't zombies.Hell if you have r/w access to these files, you can have a little fun by removing your name or changing your name so that your system admin doesn't know you are there. :-) > When the system runs very slowly, check to see if you have any sqlexec > processes with a PPID=1; these are consuming resources even though the > process that called them has ended > (usually in some error condition). These rogue sqlexec's cannot be killed > either. These are zombies, or well sort of.Zombies occur when you kill the parent, but you don't kill the child. (Damn, doesn't it sound so satanic?) :-) The child then consider's root to be its parent, however, root doesn't know that it has a new child! (The rat bastard!) So you can't send any kill SIGs to the child. Hence a zombie. Now IMHO, I thought this was limited to SYS V R4 variants. I thought BSD variants didn't have this problem. (Hell its been a while since I did any kernel hacking so I could be wrong.) -Mikey BTW, The rumors of my stalking Mike Saranga for blackmail evidence are greatly exagerated. In fact, they are damn lies. At least that's what my lawyers tell me to say! ;-)