Two strange processes

[Bruce Marshall]

On Tuesday 12 January 2010, Georgi Kourtev wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Today I found something unusual for me in the System Activity list.
> 
> 1. dhclient process (don't have idea what is this) that is owned by root
>  and is a zombie in terms of CPU usage.
> 2. init, also owned by root (don't have idea what is this either), that is
> stopped.
> 
> Does anyone knows whether this is normal behaviour?  It seems to me that
>  this was not the case some time ago.  BTW the status of these two does not
>  change after reboot.

Running 9.10??

dhclient is the thingy that asks for an IP address  (dhcp)  from whoever 
answers the call.

Init is the thingy that starts up all processes at boot time.

The only thing I can add is that I have a server machine running  9.10.  It 
gets updated with new fixes about once a month.

I tried to update it yesterday and it totally blew the system.   Upon boot, it 
would run XFCE just fine (my desktop mgr for it)  but NONE of the other 
services started...   postfix, fetchmail, dhcpd   nothing...   I couldn't even 
get a real console session...  just a cursor.  

So there may be an update in there that is messing up your system too if you 
are all up to date.

I tried the update process twice, and the same thing happened in both cases...  
The only way I could recover was to copy over all the updated stuff from a 
backup.