Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

Unloading an unloadable NLM

One of the frustrating things about NetWare has always been its distinct lack of a decent process killer. Part of this was perhaps over-confidence on the part of Drew Major (and others), thinking that we would never need a process killer because there would be no such thing as a runaway process on NetWare. Another (good) reason might be that killing a process can sometimes be as risky as letting it run, even if it runs until the next server restart.

With NetWare 6, we got a fairly useful bash implementation, along with some standard utilities (grep, egrep, fgrep, cat, etc.). We also happened to get kill and killall. Now, the problem with kill is, of course, that one needs a process id to feed it. Naturally, among the things we lack is a port of ps (don't ask me why!). Trying killall results in a slew of public symbol errors (at least for me). So, what to do?