Those are HP Data Protector processes, and as you have hopefully gleaned from the other responses to your question, it's not the process that's hung the tape drive, but rather the tape drive that's hung the process. If you use 'ps auxww' instead of 'ps -ef', then you'll see process state as the 8th column. My guess is that this column will be either "D" (uninterruptible sleep) or "Z" (defunct). If it's Z, stop worrying about it. If it's D...give up or start jiggling cables. :-) D typically means it's waiting on hardware, and it'll wait forever. If it's "S", then it'll wake up when the kernel wakes it up (but it should respond to the kill -9 in that case). Here's the process state list from the man page of RHEL's ps: PROCESS STATE CODES Here are the different values that the s, stat and state output specifiers (header "STAT" or "S") will display to describe the state of a process. D Uninterruptible sleep (usually IO) R Running or runnable (on run queue) S Interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete) T Stopped, either by a job control signal or because it is being traced. W paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel) X dead (should never be seen) Z Defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its parent. -----Original Message----- From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of sunhux G Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 10:54 PM To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list Subject: Options to stop processes that can't be killed -9 other than reboot Hi I have 2 processes (shown by ps -ef below) which has 'jammed' the tape drive below & I can't "kill -9" them. Is there any way short of reboot to stop them, say "service xxx restart" or anything else other than rebooting this Linux 4.x server? Since reboot involves doing "service stop xxx" of various services, surely one of the xxx must be able to stop the processes (just an educated guess). We faced this issue with our Dataprotector quite often so frequent reboot is not an option. # ps -ef |grep -i bma |grep -v grep root 10197 1 0 Aug13 ? 00:00:08 /opt/omni/lbin/vbda -bmaname HP:Ultrium 4-SCSI_4 -type 2 -start 1313175661 -level 0 -access 1 0 -protection 2 1209600 -name / -ma xxxdgjt1.ss.de 22000 -id 1313175612 -volume / -profile -no_lock -hlink -no_touch -no_encode -no_expand_sparse -no_nwuncompress -no_compress -no_preview -profile -report 0 -on_busy 2 -no_nthlink -archattr -share_info -objname 02 xxxdgjt1.ss.de:/ // / -no_aligned root 23303 1 0 Aug13 ? 00:00:03 /opt/omni/lbin/vbda -bmaname HP:Ultrium 4-SCSI_1 -type 2 -start 1313192083 -level 0 -access 1 0 -protection 2 1209600 -name / -ma xxxdgjt1.ss.de 22000 -id 1313192026 -volume / -profile -no_lock -hlink -no_touch -no_encode -no_expand_sparse -no_nwuncompress -no_compress -no_preview -profile -report 0 -on_busy 2 -no_nthlink -archattr -share_info -objname 02 xxxdgjt1.ss.de:/ // / -no_aligned root 25618 1 0 Aug13 ? 00:00:03 /opt/omni/lbin/vbda -bmaname HP:Ultrium 4-SCSI_1 -type 2 -start 1313195066 -level 0 -access 1 0 -protection 2 1209600 -name / -ma xxxdgjt1.ss.de 22000 -id 1313195016 -volume / -profile -no_lock -hlink -no_touch -no_encode -no_expand_sparse -no_nwuncompress -no_compress -no_preview -profile -report 0 -on_busy 2 -no_nthlink -archattr -share_info -objname 02 xxxdgjt1.ss.de:/ // / -no_aligned they're listening on the Tcp ports : [root@xxxdgjt1 ~]# netstat -antp | grep 25618 tcp 21 0 172.17.1.47:5555 172.17.12.12:2128 CLOSE_WAIT 25618/vbda [root@xxxdgjt1 ~]# netstat -antp | grep 23303 tcp 21 0 172.17.1.47:5555 172.17.12.12:2073 CLOSE_WAIT 23303/vbda fuser all other partitions do not show processes locking/opening files, only the root (ie / ) partition : # fuser / |grep 25618 ==> will show 25618 & 25618r as amongst the processes # fuser / |grep 23303 ==> will show 23303 & 23303r as amongst the processes # cd /etc # ls */*omni* xinetd.d/omni opt/omni: client server -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list