Unkillable processes?

[Ben Scott]

On 2/18/06, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
>> That means they're in "uninterruptable sleep" ... Bad hardware or
>> buggy device drivers are the most common cause of a process
>> stuck in this state.
>
> Or, an NFS server from which this system mounted a file system has
> gone off the net.

  Oh, yah, that.  I don't have to use NFS very often.  Thankfully.  :)

> ... any process which stats all mounted file systems (think df, ls,
> etc.) hangs and can't be killed.

  Won't mounting the NFS filesystems with the "soft,intr" options
prevent that from happening in the first place?  (The "can't be
killed" part -- obviously, they'll still choke if they try to contact
a dead server.)

-- Ben