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| For some reason, Samba has decided to spawn literally hundreds of | processed which are now in "D" state (not sure what that means).
As others have pointed out these Zombie or UNINTERRUPTIBLE processes cannot be killed at this point in time.
When processes terminate they return some status information to their parent or in the case that the parent has gone away they are reparented to the init process. Certain situations especially involving hardware or network operations putting a process in to an UNINTERRUPTIBLE state in which it cannot be sent signals or cleanup properly can result in a process left kicking around. You cannot kill these.
What you should worry about is why you are in this situation - did your networking die somewhat abruptly or did a hardware wibble occur?
| Although the CPU and swap are almost completely idle, my system load is | running at around 300 and strange things are happening
This might partly be explained by an underlying physical problem. Unfortunately if you are running a stable system with no known issues then there is always the possibility of a broken rootkit being present which has tried to modify the kernel and been mismatched and broken.
| I'll probably have to restart this time, but in future, how can I kill | processes that just won't die? I've already tried "killall -9 smbd".
You cannot send smbd a signal at this point because it is not actually running and accepting signals. The action above would have been correct in the standard case. Perhaps you can send us some logging entries specifically around the time of the forced restart.
Jon. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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