Re: [TCLUG:11983] ps auxf oddity

[Jon Schewe <jpschewe@eggplant.mtu.net>]

Mark K wrote:
> 
> This morning when I came in, one of the servers was quite unresponsive.
> SSH did not want to log me in, (probably because of a DNS failure), when
> going to the main console, tried doing a "ps auxf" and got the following:
> 
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM  SIZE   RSS TTY STAT START   TIME COMMAND
> root         2  0.0  0.0     0     0  ?  SW  09:37   0:00 (\005\005)
> bin        265  0.0  0.1  1196   396  ?  S   09:38   0:00 portmap
> daemon     345  0.0  0.1  1128   484  ?  S   09:38   0:00 /usr/sbin/atd
> Segmentation fault
> 
> I've never seen a "(\005\005)" before, and normally, kflushd is my PID 2.
> Any ideas as to what this might be?  I'm thinking some kernel feature is
> making this thing corrupt.  Any input would be great!
> 
It's possible that it's still kflushd.  Any process can change it's name
in the process list, sendmail does this quite often.  My guess is that
kflushd tried to change its name and puked.
-- 
Jon Schewe 
http://eggplant.mtu.net/~jpschewe
schewe@tcfreenet.org