Howdy,

I've a box with three identical looking process trees - a bash process is a child of an su - which is the child of init.

These three processes were started on consecutive days about 6 weeks ago and have collectively cause a quiet web server to have a load average of 4. I've not seen these before, but I've not been looking, and suspect that their load is likely to correlate to a point yesterday morning when that same server appeared to start doing 100 DNS requests per second of the same internal hostname.

Why would an su not started on boot (box has 80+ days uptime before these started) be owned directly by init? Would they have been reparented somehow?

I've not got a clue what these are doing and why they are there. The owners are a generic system account for our webapp server and I can see from proc and lsof what their working directories are an such, but past this I can't really find out anything about them, and obviously as they parent back to init so quickly, there's not much else to go on.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Hello acid_kewpie

One way the processes could have been re-parented would be if the su was run via nohup from a terminal that was subsequently closed.

Can you find out what they are doing from where <PID> is the process ID for each process under investigation in turn.

If that doesn't give enough you may be able to dump strings from the processes' memory for further clues.

Best

Charles

There is nothing in the cmdline, just "su -" for the parent and "-bash" for the child. We have a horrible convention of running "sudo su -" to get root access, so we can't evn see who ran the su, as thanks to sudo, it was root...

nohup sounds like a plausible route to explore, thanks,

Hello Chris

You could check the /var/log/auth.log* files from when they were started, looking for the su records ...

Best

Charles

these are too old now, very start of june they appeared, and our log monitoring infrastructure is just woeful... we'll have the logs on our syslog servers, but I, as the principle Linux Administrator, am not allowed to access the syslog servers for security reasons. Go figure...

Made me chuckle! That's one anal-retentive (and ineffective) security policy!

So there's only an su parent and child bash process? Does that mean the child is running a bash script rather than an executable? If so it will (?) have a copy of the bash script in memory, probably stripped of comments but still legible ...