From: Eiler, James A. (James.Eiler@alcoa.com)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 10:14:19 EDT
Original question at the bottom....
I received responses from the following:
Robert Binkley
Dr. Thomas Blinn
John Pshyk
Iain Barker
THANKS!
Bottom line: no firm solutions, and the problem just went away!
Robert wanted to know if I was at the latest Patch Kit. Answer: no.
Dr. Tom replied: "Without going and examining the "ps" code in detail,
I can't be sure, but my expectation is that the code is getting back
data from the kernel that it knows is wrong, so when it constructs
the strings in memory that eventually get output to your display,
it's putting in the question marks. But that's just a guess."
John said he posted a similar problem several months ago and received
no replies.
Iain had two questions: Were you logged in non-root? Answer: both
non-root and root logins saw the problem. Running C2 cert? No.
In my UPDATE message that I submitted later in the day of the
problem, I wrote:
The same system has been running all day (no reboots, etc.)
The ps command now works fine - no question marks.
Bewildering.....
Haven't seen the problem since then. I guess we'll follow Robert's
advice and apply the latest Patch Kit.
Seeing as though there are no firm solutions, I'll borrow some text
from Dr. Tom's "trailer":
"Yesterday it worked / Today it is not working / UNIX is like that
-- apologies to Margaret Segall"
Thanks again!
Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: Eiler, James A. [mailto:James.Eiler@alcoa.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 10:18 AM
To: 'tru64-unix-managers@ornl.gov'
Subject: question marks in output from ps command
Hi All,
Running a DS20, Tru64 5.1A, no Patch Kits.
I issue the ps command and get:
# ps
PID TTY S TIME CMD
1633 console ???+ ?? /usr/sbin/getty console console vt100
2172 pts/1 ???+ ?? -ksh (ksh)
2173 pts/2 ???+ ?? -ksh (ksh)
2174 pts/3 ???+ ?? -ksh (ksh)
490132 pts/5 ???+ ?? -ksh (ksh)
63183 pts/7 ??? ?? ksh
67142 pts/7 ???+ ?? ps
I do a more elaborate ps and get:
# ps -o time,state,psxpri,pgid,pid,command
TIME S PPR PGID PID COMMAND
?? ???+ ? 1633 1633 /usr/sbin/getty console console vt100
?? ???+ ? 2172 2172 -ksh (ksh)
?? ???+ ? 2173 2173 -ksh (ksh)
?? ???+ ? 2174 2174 -ksh (ksh)
?? ???+ ? 490132 490132 -ksh (ksh)
?? ??? ? 63183 63183 ksh
?? ???+ ? 65084 65084 ps -o time,state,psxpri,pgid,pid,command
Any idea(s) what all the question marks (?? and ???) indicate???
Thanks!
Jim
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Sat Apr 12 2008 - 10:49:24 EDT