killing a stuck "D" process

[Gaspar Bakos]

Hi, Damian,

RE:
> You have three options:
> o Wait for it to finish on its own (may never happen if it's trying to
>    access a hardware device that no longer exists).

Indeed, this never happens. And in the meantime, it allocates the tape
drive, and the tape can not be ejected. And we need to continue with
reading in data from another tape...

In fact, the problem is somewhat misterious. We issued
tar tvf /dev/nst0
without specifying the blocksize, such as
tar tvf /dev/nst0 -b 1024

> o Ignore it -- it's not using resources anyway.

It does, as i mentioned above.
mt -f /dev/nst0 offline
or anything else do not work.

> o Kill its parent.  In your case, the parent is init, so this is
>    equivalent to rebooting.

And this is what finally we resorted to.
It is a pity that such situations can happen where a'la windoz style,
the only thing that helps is reboot. I am not used to that...

Gaspar