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Re: Adventures in Linux Land
gaekwad wrote #338552:
I have noticed web admin system control panels (e.g., cPanel & WHM) tend to steer admins towards using
/homefor www stuff, but that scares me.
cPanel users don’t have superuser privs, so there isn’t much choice here. (Well, creating a user-accessible folder in /var would work but be weird. Consider /dev/urandom > /var/user/x.)
Last edited by skewray (2024-12-16 16:56:38)
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Re: Adventures in Linux Land
skewray wrote #338553:
cPanel users don’t have superuser privs, so there isn’t much choice here.
That explains it. That extra level of opinionated middleware that a lot of administrators rely on as a safety net is such a fluffy mess sometimes – if I get called to fix something, I tend to use raw CLI commands, and the number of times I’ve had to unpick the changes that cPanel & WHM have made and take an unorthodox approach so I don’t break something is disturbingly high.
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#27 2024-12-18 16:05:13
- Algaris
- Member
- From: England
- Registered: 2006-01-27
- Posts: 562
Re: Adventures in Linux Land
Today I learnt’t about zombie processes. I’m constantly amused by Linux terminology. I encountered one while doing an update and rebooting my Ubuntu server. It took me a while to figure out what was going on.
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A zombie process is a process in a Unix or Linux operating system that has completed execution (terminated) but still has an entry in the process table. This occurs because the parent process has not yet read the exit status of the terminated child process, using a system call like wait() or waitpid().
Key Characteristics of Zombie Processes:
1. State: The zombie process is in the Z (zombie) state, visible in tools like ps under the “STAT” column.
2. Minimal Resources: Zombies do not use CPU or memory resources (other than the small process table entry).
3. Cause: They are created when a child process ends, and its parent has not handled the SIGCHLD signal or called wait() to clean up the child’s resources.
4. Temporary Nature: They usually disappear quickly once the parent process collects the child’s exit status.
Why Are They a Problem?
Resource Exhaustion: If many zombie processes accumulate, they can consume all available process table entries, preventing new processes from being created.
Indicative of Bugs: Persistent zombies often indicate a programming error in the parent process, such as failing to properly handle terminated child processes.
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Textile Blockquotes are incredibly annoying to work with.
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Re: Adventures in Linux Land
I’ve never seen a zombie movie where the reason given for the zombies is, “Zombies are created when a child dies, and their parents have not handled the death notice or waited to clean up the child’s belongings.”
Bizarre.
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