Zombie processes ...

[Russ Allbery]

Marc G Fournier <scrappy at hub.org> writes:

> Two questions ... first, what is the [11498] in the log file:

> Mar  8 20:43:03 news nnrpd[11498]: SERVER perl filtering enabled

> I would have thought it was PID, but if I do a grep for, say, 3277 in
> the log file, it doesn't return anything:

It is the PID.

> %grep 3277 /var/log/news/news.notice
> %

Could that nnrpd be so old that it's in the previous day's news.notice?

> Next question ... how do you disable the PERL filtering in nnrpd?  I
> don't find a switch in etc/inn.conf ... just figured I'd disable it and
> see if maybe *it* is somehow affecting things ...

Seems unlikely, but I think you can do that by removing the Perl filter
file.

The root issue here is that innd is not reaping its children.  Why it's
not reaping its children, I have no idea; none of the code in that area
has changed in eons.  It's also a very strange thing to have suddenly
start happening.

The relevant code is PROCreap in innd/proc.c.  You might want to add some
sort of logging to that function to see if (a) it ever gets called and (b)
if it does, what it thinks it's doing when it does get called.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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