[NTLUG:Discuss] Night of the Zombies.

[Stephen Klein]

I got myself into an interesting situation last night.  I have a small
486 with 12MB RAM and 120MB HD that I am using as an access router and
terminal server.  I am using mgetty to answer calls and get a shell
going, then I start a ppp session over the established connection.


I had just finished recompiling the kernel and was copying it to the
root when I was disconnected.  When I dialed back, the modem would
answer, and I would get a connect at 9600bps, but wouldn't get a login
prompt.  I telnetted in through another system on the LAN, and found out
that pppd, bash, and mc (midnight commander) were in the Zombie state
(these were the programs I was running when I was disconnected).  I ran
LILO just to finish installing the new kernel, and then I tried to do a
reboot (shutdown -r now).  I saw the reboot message that init prints,
but the telnet session never got disconnected.  I checked for running
processes and found that shutdown was now added to the list of zombie
processes.  I tried it again and added yet another zombie.  After
fiddling around with PS, I found out that all of the processes that were
zombies were stuck at gettitimer.

Anyone know how to deal with zombie processes, or maybe how to trigger a
reboot (no shutdown) from the command prompt.  I fought for several
hours with this problem, but to no avail.  I'll have someone pull the
power and reconnect it in the morning.


I also realized later that rebooting wouldn've been fatal anyway, seems
I left a floppy in the drive and the BIOS is set to stupid mode.


Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Stephen Klein