no respond to KILL -9 or any signal

[Niels Dettenbach]

Dear List readers and FreeBSD coders,

since 5.2 i experienced in timespans of some days or weeks the effect on our 
internet server machine, that processes got hanging and are not killable by 
kill -9 or any other signal.

Most times it seems that perl based processes are affected like spamd 
(Spamassassin), amavisd-new but one time my exim got hanged too.

ps afux says the proces are in state "DL" - wich doesn't change after a "kill" 
or "kill -9 " - i didn't found any way to get the procs killed or cleaned 
out.

So i have to reboot the machine (with hard reset!) each time to get the 
hanging service running again - that's really not nice for a productive 
system!

The Machine started with a 5.0 installation years ago. The effect arises since 
somewhere around 5.1/5.2 - during my 6.0 installation not over several 
monthes - since updates / with new fresh install on 6.2 it comes back. 
Ideas - it comes from a hardware bug - i can't follow. We have checked the 
hardware different times and the problem was gone over monthes during a 
(untouched) 6.0 installation. With Linux the box the problem is not there but 
im not like to switch to linux - i like FreeBSD in its way for my productive 
systems.

We tried different installations and kernel configs and a lot of new world 
build and port updates. It looks like a problem somewhere with any kind of IO 
interactions but im not shure...

i use:
===
- FreeBSD ffm-dr1.syndicat.com 6.2-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p3 #0:
- on a Intel Dual XEON 
- Intel SE Server Board
- 2GB RAM 
- with Intel (former ICP-Vortex) U320 SCSI Controller (RAID1) - (iir driver)
- IDE disc drive (backup only)
- 2x NIC
- with and without jails

env:
===
CPUTYPE=p4
CPUTYPE?=p4

Perl is 5.8.8 - i've tried perl from ports as the default FreeBSD perl.

(add. data available on request)

The problem is urgent for us so any useful info or help is very welcome!...

Best regards and cheers,
-- 
  Niels Dettenbach
  ---
  Syndicat IT&Internet
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  Heilbad Heiligenstadt - DE

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