On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 08:27:29AM +1100, Robert Elz wrote:
> I see this as well.
> 
> This has been on my "I absolutely am going to debug this problem" list for
> about 2 years now ... I wanted to use this to get some kgdb experience,
> 
> Frank - Sam sent ps output.  I often can't - we have tend to have so many
> cron based nfs accesses that by the time anyone notices this is happening the
> process table on the clients is full, and it isn't possible to do anything
> at all (in particular, to log in...).

Depending on the environment for the machine, you could use a kernel with
DDB and take the ps from there.

> still on my "I will debug this unless someone else fixes it first" list,
> I just need to find a group of systems I can use where kgdb works (I assume
> it does work in i386 NetBSD?   ... if so, I will try a setup using a group
> of them one day).

It does, and you'll be shocked how simple it is after the first time you
set it up.

This sounds like one of those problems that seems harder to investigate than
to live with the consequences of - no matter how annoying :-) Been there.

You could also install a cron to notify you when dead processes are building
up, before they make a system unusable.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Mastery of UNIX, like
mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear,
but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live
in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. - Thomas Scoville