Tu77 ate tape, then hung device.

[lou at hoxna.UUCP]

	I have a backup that runs every night by itself.  Last
night the drive ate the tape, stalling the reel half-way through.
When I showed up in the morning, I cleared the mess out of the drive,
&& restarted the backup, but I couldn't create /dev/rmt0 .

	I looked around, and the original cpio was still running, so
I did kill -9 20279. No problem, right ?  Funny thing is, the process
was still alive.  I could 'kill -9' it all I wanted, and it wouldn't
die.  I killed the parent, && eventually it was adopted by init, 
(ppid was 1 ), but I *still* couldn't touch it.  And of course, *that* 
process was still using /dev/rmt0, so I couldn't access the device.....  
Anyone have any idea what happened ? Am I even right in assuming that 
this 'immortal' cpio was stopping me from writing to the device ?

It's a 780 running 5.2, TU77 drive.  I finally re-booted, && the problem
went away.  Anything less drastic I could have done ?

                                                     lou @ hoxna

ps - No, the backup procedure doesn't catch any signals.