How to force logoff remotely?

[Andrew Robinson]

At 03:57 PM 1/12/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 14:56, Andrew Robinson wrote:
> > andrew    4886     1  0 Jan11 ?        00:00:00 [gnome-session <defunct>]
> >
> > The name "gnome-session" looked promising, so I tried a 'kill -(harrison
> > ford) 4886'. There appeared to be no effect.
>
>Try to login (ssh or console) as andrew and run:
>   kill -KILL -1
>
>That should kill every process andrew has permission to kill.  DO NOT
>ever do this as root.  ;-)
>
>You appear to have many defunct (zombie) processes.  Zombies may or may
>not cause problems.  They aren't actually running.  The defunct programs
>are dead but waiting for their parent to free them.  The parent process
>that launched those processes "forgot" to clean up when they exited.
>(But it sounds like you know that.)
>
>You might try killing gdm and see if that frees them.  ("init 3" and
>check your process list.  "init 5" to get back up to graphical.)
>Otherwise, they'll probably show up in the process list until init is
>killed (i.e. reboot).  It's extremely rare for your entire login session
>to zombie.  Something strange must've happened; perhaps a hung mount
>command or something.

Thanks. When I left the computer the night before, it was running up2date. 
Apparently I'm having some of the same problems with up2date that I see 
others complaining about.

Andrew Robinson