From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 5 10:30:44 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id KAA07605 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 10:30:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from lserver.infoworld.com (lserver.infoworld.com [192.216.48.4]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA07488 for ; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 10:30:39 -0800 (PST) From: Brett_Glass@infoworld.com Received: from ccgate.infoworld.com (ccgate.infoworld.com [192.216.49.101]) by lserver.infoworld.com (8.8.4/8.8.4/GNAC-GW-2.1) with SMTP id KAA04954 for ; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 10:30:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from ccMail by ccgate.infoworld.com (SMTPLINK V2.11) id AA855167139; Wed, 05 Feb 97 11:17:15 PST Date: Wed, 05 Feb 97 11:17:15 PST Message-Id: <9701058551.AA855167139@ccgate.infoworld.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Hung getty process Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk One of our servers, which is running 2.1.0-R, had a modem which was answering the phone but not allowing logins. It was driving callers crazy, but since most of them were using login scripts, all they knew was that things were failing somehow. I did a "ps" and discovered that the getty process for the port was stuck waiting for disk access. (There was a capital "D" in the status field.) I couldn't kill the process -- even as a superuser -- with kill -9. Eventually, I had to kick everyone off and reboot the server. What can cause this? Is it a sign of a bug -- perhaps a problem with a weird received character or an overflowing input buffer? (It's a dumb serial port with a 16550, so it uses the standard sio driver.) I'd like to prevent any of our modems from being wedged again. --Brett