[Dxspider-support] Weird node issue that prevents user logins

[Brendan Minish]

Hello 

I am seeing a strange issue on EI7SDX that arises very occasionally
causing it to not progress any user logins.

 from a user's perspective the login hangs at 

$ telnet ei7sdx.ath.cx 7300
Trying 95.172.12.170...
Connected to ei7sdx.ath.cx.
Escape character is '^]'.


when I log into the cluster it appears to be running but I see when I run ps aux 
hundreds of processes that look like this 

sysop    27358  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    Oct01   0:00 [cp] <defunct>

they go back over several days but the issue only arose from a user's
perspective yesterday 

the sysop console can't login either, restarting the cluster by killing
it's pid gets things going again but all the defunct processes remain
until after a reboot

the cluster is running on Centos 5.3 and is pretty much identical in
most ways to ei7mre except that ei7sdx has a web client running. Am i
seeing fallout from web client users not terminating sessions or
something ? 

any ideas anyone ? 


-- 
73
Brendan EI6IZ