adb causing problems.

[Gavin Stewart]

Adb is running hourly on our hp-ux 11.11 vpar of a Superdome and seems to be hanging. This is using all the CPU on the server.

root 19856 19854 181 16:00:00 ? 7:01 adb -k /stand/vmunix /dev/mem

Can I stop this hanging or stop it running safely?

Thanks.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

adb is used to examione binary program code, including the kernel. You first need to find the code that is starting adb. The command shown does not indicate what commands were sent to adb so you can't debug the problem from ps. If you simply type the above command, it will ALWAYS appear to hang--adb is a VERY unfriendly program and gives no prompt at all, but expects that you know what you are supposed to type.

It can also be run in a script by echoing the appropriate commands and piping them to adb. But adb is looking at the running kernel (in your example) and scripts/programs cannot depend on the same commands to work the same way between revisions of HP-UX. Look at PPID (the parent process ID) 19854 for a clue as to where adb was started and start debugging. And saince it is running hourly, crontab -l will show you all the time-scheduled processes which makes tracking the culprit a lot easier.

[Gavin Stewart]

You're spot on. It was a dodgy script that someone was running which called adb.

Problem solved.

[Tim Nelson]

In case you are still interested and in a vPar environment.

adb has an issue accessing the higher memory region of vPars. use /dev/kmem instead of /dev/mem or get new adb available on software.hp.com