OPCOM cannot be stopped - KILL needed?

[Ian Miller.]

For altering quotas use Availability Manager. If, for some strange reason, you do not have that set up then use

http://www.quadratrix.be/qapq.html

[John Gillings]

PJ,

An even bigger, uglier and more dangerous hammer... only if you're truly desperate.

If the process really is looping in LIBRTL, and you can work out where (use the sources), and you can be fairly sure it's a rarely executed path... Since LIBRTL is resident, you could "patch" an instruction in on the fly from another process. Make it an illegal operand to force the process to crash.

Downsides - first you have to hope the process doesn't keep that particular instruction in an I-cache. Second you might kill innocent bystanders (including processes like the ones that might be controlling a pour of a few hundred tons of molten steel?)

[Hoff]

John, I was refraining from suggesting it -- having gone as far as the RBH, but -- OK -- you started it. Just clonk a register or the stack from within kernel-mode, within in the context of the looping process. Preferably resetting whatever register is causing the loop, if you can sort that out. This assumes the loop is in user-mode. No i-cache work required.

[John Gillings]

PJ,

Perhaps obvious... if you leave the system in its current bad state until you get a chance to shutdown, make sure you force a crash, and send the dump to HP for analysis. Anything that happens on OpenVMS which forces a reboot needs to be elevated to engineering.

Hoff, I was assuming that the failure of STOP/ID to affect a process which doesn't have NODELET set means it must be in inner mode, or at AST level. Wouldn't that prevent getting anything done in process context? (can't remember the rules for lobbing ASTs at other processes - does a SPKAST always get through?)

[Volker Halle]

Paul,

just to confirm: OpenVMS engineering is still working on a looping OPCOM problem in OpenVMS I64 V8.3...

Please raise a call and provide information from your problem. The more information about such a problem is being collected at the engineering level, the better are the chances to pin down and solve the problem.

In any case, try to force a crash instead of just shutting down and rebooting the system.

Volker.

[Robert_Boyd]

Paul,

As I recall -- OPCOM is where accounting runs -- do you have accounting enabled? If so, try stopping accounting and see if anything changes.

Robert

[Jim_McKinney]

> OPCOM is where accounting runs

How so? My recollection is that accounting is hooked into LOGINOUT.

[Paul Jerrom]

Howdy all,
I was granted a small outage time so I could reboot this server, so was not able to generate dumps etc etc. So I'll keep mosying on and see if the same thing occurs again.

Thanks for the interest, all.

PJ