dberg@uunet.uu.net (David I. Berg) (02/02/91)
From time to time, while I am dialed into our out from a serial port on a SUN 3/260 (4.0.3) a noise burst will interrupt my session and knock me off the line. When I am unable to reconnect, I find that the process that was connected to the modem is <exiting>. This process cannot be killed, and tip cannot reconnect to the port. The only way I have found to restore a semblance of normalcy is to reboot. This seems to be a rather harsh resolution to what should be a simple problem. Any and all suggestions are welcome, including flames about my procedures, if need be. [[Ed's Note: The (exiting) state usually indicates that a child process has exited and is waiting for it's parent to execute a wait() system call before it goes away (this is the "ZOMBIE" state). Once a process gets in this state, it can not be terminated by any signal, the only thing that will clean it out is the parent issuing a wait. From your message, it's hard to tell, but a couple of haphazard guesses come to mind: (a) Your actual login process hangs when you get disconnected and thus, CAN'T issue a wait to clean up the children. (b) Your child processes are getting orphaned when your main process dies and for some reason init isn't adopting them. I am not really sure how you can remedy this problem. -bdg]]