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RE: [LUG] My server is <defunct>



Bon-jewer

No idea what happened, but <defunct> processes are 'zombies', i.e. their
parent process did not handle SIGCHLD correctly (sent when a child process
dies).  Look at their parent process, if it is 1 (init) I doubt there is
much you can do, but a look down the /proc tree might give some clues.  You
may have been the victim of a DOS attack, or just a bad program that looped
around a fork.  Killing (kill -KILL pid) defunct processes should not have
any bad effects, but it means you will not be able to investigate further.
They are not a great strain on resources, but there are limits on the number
of processes that can run, so they are best got rid of when you can.

Ory-vire
Clive

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Melhuish [mailto:jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 22 April 2003 20:25
To: list@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [LUG] My server is <defunct>


Hello from France!  Ahh, the wonders of the Internet, eh?  You can go 
somewhere relatively interesting and still do the same boring crap you do at

home ;-)

Anyway, I've been having a few problems with my web server.  It seemed to 
reboot itself several times on saturday, then when I tried to reboot it, it 
finally died and didn't come back until the support staff at UK2 *finally* 
fixed it today.

However, there are two things that are puzzling me somewhat:

*  /var/log dissappeared.  Completely.  Whilst I was using the machine.  My 
root password is still the same, I can't find any other evidence of being 
hacked.

*  There are loads (maybe 100 or so) processes listed as <defunct> in the 
process list.  I think I've seen this before, but only for an instant before

they die.  Why are they kicking around, and will this become a problem?

Merci en avance...

Jon

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