<exiting>
David I. Berg
infmx!dberg at uunet.uu.net
Sat Feb 2 08:17:01 AEST 1991
>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]]
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