Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: amanda vs 2.6
Original-Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0311261202050.1524@home.osdl.org>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 20:07:34 GMT
Message-ID: <fa.j2sapd9.1di6lor@ifi.uio.no>

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, William Lee Irwin III wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 02:43:43PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > No, it just hangs forever on the su command, never coming back.
> > everything else I tried, which wasn't much, seemed to keep on working
> > as I sent that message with that hung su process in another shell on
> > another window.  I'm an idiot, normally running as root...
> > I've rebooted, not knowing if an echo 0 to that variable would fix it
> > or not, I see after the reboot the default value is 0 now.
>
> Okay, then we need to figure out what the hung process was doing.
> Can you find its pid and check /proc/$PID/wchan?

I've seen this before, and I'll bet you 5c (yeah, I'm cheap) that it's
trying to log to syslogd.

And syslogd is stopped for some reason - either a bug, a mistaken SIGSTOP,
or simply because the console has been stopped with a simple ^S.

That won't stop "su" working immediately - programs can still log to
syslogd until the logging socket buffer fills up. Which can be _damn_
frsutrating to find (I haven't seen this behaviour lately, but I remember
being perplexed like hell a long time ago).

			Linus