can't kill crashed processes

[Benjamin Hornberger]

At 11:11 AM 1/27/2005 -0800, you wrote:
>Benjamin Hornberger wrote:
>>Hi all,
>>I have the problem that I can't kill certain frozen processes on RHEL AS 
>>3. Somehow, up2date crashes each time when I try to run it from a Win XP 
>>machine tunneled through SSH (with Exceed running), and now I have three 
>>of these processes around.
>>[root at host root]# ps -ef | grep up2date
>>root      3178     1  0 09:33 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      3366     1  0 09:44 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      6851     1  5 13:43 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      6918  6871  0 13:45 pts/3    00:00:00 grep up2date
>>[root at host root]# kill -9 3178
>>[root at host root]# ps -ef | grep up2date
>>root      3178     1  0 09:33 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      3366     1  0 09:44 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      6851     1  4 13:43 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      6920  6871  0 13:45 pts/3    00:00:00 grep up2date
>>[root at host root]# kill -9 3366
>>[root at host root]# ps -ef | grep up2date
>>root      3178     1  0 09:33 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      3366     1  0 09:44 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      6851     1  4 13:43 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
>>/usr/sbin/up2date
>>root      6922  6871  0 13:45 pts/3    00:00:00 grep up2date
>>[root at host root]#
>
>Do a "ps -ax" and see if the processes are shown with "<defunct>".  If
>so, they're zombies and you won't be able to get rid of them unless you
>kill their parent process.  In your case, the parent process is "init"
>(the master process) and the only way to kill init safely is to reboot.

[root at host root]# ps -ax | grep up2date
  3178 ?        D      0:05 /usr/bin/python -u /usr/sbin/up2date
  3366 ?        D      0:05 /usr/bin/python -u /usr/sbin/up2date
  6851 ?        D      0:05 /usr/bin/python -u /usr/sbin/up2date
  7335 pts/13   S      0:00 grep up2date
[root at host root]#

If I understand the ps man pages right, the "D" means "uninterruptible 
sleep", and not "defunct" (which would be "Z"). Anything else I can do?

Thanks,
Benjamin