[Serusers] defunct process

[Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul]

On Jun 06, 2003 at 16:53, Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul <pelinescu-onciul at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> On Jun 06, 2003 at 22:04, Wong Tsang Han <tsanghan at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > 
> > I have installed ser-0.8.11pre29-1 on RedHat 9.0. When I start ser by script
> > /etc/init.d/ser or directly using /usr/sbin/ser, the process SOMETIMES hangs
> > at the Aliases line show below. When I list the process table, I observed
> > there was a defunct process. Now, this does not happen ALL the time when I
> > starts ser. Sometime, /use/sbin/ser or init script will start fine without a
> > hiccup. I also notice that the defunct process is ALWAYS the second lowest
> > process id among all ser processes. Can this be a case of race condition for
> > the parent process to exit without waiting for the child?
> > 
> > I did not encounter this using ser-0.8.10 on RedHat 7.3. However, I do
> > remember encountering this behavior once when running ser-0.8.10 on RedHat
> > 9.0, I have removed 0.8.10 and installed 0.8.11 since then for testing
> > 0.8.11. Could this be a problem of RedHat 9.0? Is anyone experience this or
> > am I the only one?
> 
> I'm afraid you are the only one :-) We haven't encoutered this before.

Well, Daniel manage to reproduce this on RH 9. It seems there is some
kind of race condition between our daemonize function and our signal
handlers (daemonize will fork & exit to become session leader and we
caught our own SIGCHLD). It should be fixed now on cvs (pre31).
Could you try again?

Thanks,
Andrei