Zombie accounting processes

[Phil Mayers]

George-Cristian Bîrzan wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 12:56 +0000, Phil Mayers wrote:
>> George-Cristian Bîrzan wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 13:57 +0200, George-Cristian Bîrzan wrote:
>>>> Hello!
>>>>
>>>> I've been having a rather annoying problem with FreeRADIUS, including
>>>> version 1.1.0.
>> What OS and kernel version is the server running?
> 
> It's a Slackware 10.1 (I think, could be 10) with a 2.6.14.3 kernel.
> Same happened with 2.4.29 and 2.6.12.

Ok, so the FreeRadius executable should have only one PID since it's 
running the new threading, unless you've got an old libc?

>> Hmm. What does "ps -ejf" (on Linux - translate for closest equivalent on 
>> other systems) say for these?
> 
> root     25065 24736 23880 23880  0 15:11 ?        00:00:00 [acct-ng.pl] <defunct>
> root     25073 23885 23880 23880  0 15:11 ?        00:00:00 [acct-ng.pl] <defunct>
> 

...so why do these have different parent PIDs (2nd column)? Could 
"acct-ng.pl" be itself forking? What process are those PIDs?