Communicator hung, kill -9 won't remove

Rob Hagopian (hagopiar@vuser.vu.union.edu)
Tue, 30 Dec 1997 01:33:54 -0500 (EST)

One may remember (probably not) many weeks ago I had a user that was
complaining of hung communicator processes that kill -9 wouldn't remove...
Well, he had another, but, of course, this was the one time he wasn't
running it through strace (<sigh>). However, we do have a good System.map
now, and we're running 2.0.32, so here's tidbits (note the ps -l says
it's in wait_on_page):

[root@vuser ~]$ id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel)
[root@vuser ~]$ ps -auxww | grep communicator | grep -v grep
stepanep 14647 1.0 17.5 26260 22152 ? D 19:47 3:21 communicator
[root@vuser ~]$ kill -9 14647
[root@vuser ~]$ ps -auxww | grep communicator | grep -v grep
stepanep 14647 1.0 17.5 26260 22152 ? D 19:47 3:21 communicator
[root@vuser ~]$ strace -p14647
attach: ptrace(PTRACE_ATTACH, ...): Operation not permitted
[root@vuser ~]$ ps -auxwwl | grep communicator | grep -v grep
10 210 14647 24977 0 0 26260 22152 wait_on_pag D ? 3:21
communicator
[root@vuser ~]$

So the question is: what's going on here? This is:
Dual PPro (Tyan MBoard)
128MB RAM 127.6875MB Swap
3 NCR825 SCSI boards each controlling 2 Quantum ST drives in a RAID-5
1 Western Digital 4.0G IDE drive (/, /boot, and 1 128MB swap partition)
DLink ethernet card (tulip driver)
Trident PCI video card

Kernel 2.0.32 + latest MD driver

Any way to squeeze more info out of the system? TIA!
-Rob H.