On 2009-09-15, paranoid.gand...@googlemail.com 
<paranoid.gand...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> A process died and became a zombie process in a screen-session.
> The process was irssi and thus not critical.
> I tried to kill the zmbie-process without luck.

zombies are undead, you can't just kill them, you need to find the
process which created them and attack that instead.

> Thus I re-loged in and killed each ksh I ran.
> Then I did a screen-x and my shell freezed.
> I tried again to reconnect to the server but had no luck.
>
> I got not even a ssh-fingerprint from the sshd anymore (removed
> known_host to check) but connections where accapted by sshd (nmap scan
> and others showed "open"9 and the ssh-connections made to it NEVER
> pinged out.
>
> Another server process using OpenSSL (silc) became NON-responsive too.
> A field technican in the US went to the box and made a photo on which I
> can see very strange symbol lines.
> He was able to enter a username but the "password:"-field never
> appeared.
>
> I triggered the bug as I pressed "ctrl-c" during the reconnection because
> the connection was slow and I wanted to kill it (client-side).
> Could this be a indication for a OpenSSL bug and if so: How could I
> might trace or -trigger it again?

I think the ssl thing is a red herring, it's probably not scheduling
any processes. If you had just telnetted to port 22 it would have most
likely just connected and not shown the usual banner. I've seen it
before occasionally but not got any useful way to trigger it. It
sounds similar to hangs some people have seen while rsyncing
(especially with softdep) which points to a vm exhaustion problem
of some kind..(there have been many changes in that area since 4.5)

If you can break into ddb when this happens, trace/ps and maybe other
things might help. Better still would be traces from -current if you
can still provoke it there.

What anyone is meant to do with the information that you see "very
strange symbol lines" without more description or seeing the photo,
I don't know...

Reply via email to