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Distribution: Red Hat CentOS Ubuntu FreeBSD OpenSuSe
Posts: 252
Rep:
defunct processes
I had a server running for 3 years, and no major problems were encoutered since. But last week, I noticed that the site was not up and no email notifications (done via php scripts) were sent. Upon verifying, there were defunct applications of HTTPD, SSHD and SENDMAIL
When I thried to reboot the machine, it showed something like this
[root@bigdipper ~]# reboot
Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Sat Jun 21 16:22:24 2008):
The system is going down for reboot NOW!
init: timeout opening/writing control channel /dev/initctl
[root@bigdipper ~]#
[root@bigdipper ~]#
Is this a hardware related problem or on the php script that sends email in which at an instance the server cant handle the requests?
Diagnostics
If init finds that it is continuously respawning an entry more than 10 times in 2 minutes, it will assume that there is an error in the command string, generate an error message on the system console, and refuse to respawn this entry until either 5 minutes has elapsed or it receives a signal. This prevents it from eating up system resources when someone makes a typographical error in the /etc/inittab file or the program for the entry is removed.
It sounds like you either encountered a bug in init, or some other anomaly.
A defunct process (called a zombie) is a process that has exited, but its parent did not cleanup via wait(2). A bug, or some was some other failure in init (bit flip in init's address space?) could cause init not to cleanup, thereby eventually exhausting various limits. A reboot would be the only cure at that point, since init is the master controlling parent process.
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