fork wedging (I think)

Daniel O'Connor doconnor at gsoft.com.au
Thu Mar 1 07:05:44 UTC 2007


On Thursday 01 March 2007 17:14, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> >The problem seems to occur when the acquisition process (called the
> > Recorder) tries to fork off a new child.
>
> Your description and the ps output suggest a filesystem deadlock.

When it happened last time I had no problem running commands (ps, ls, gdb, etc 
etc).

I think the difference this time was running sysctl which does touch a lot of 
stuff (since I did sysctl -a)

> A console would make it easy.  My suggestion is to keep a shell open

Yeah it would be, alas it's in the middle of nowhere in northern Canada :)

> in /rescue and use './sysctl' (and other commands in rescue).  I think
> you will still be able to execute static executables in the current
> directory vis a relative path even if the FS is deadlocked.  (As long
> as your shell isn't trying to write command history to a file).

hmm.. I will see if I can maintain an open shell.. Going to be a PITA given 
the length of time between failures.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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