[asterisk-users] puzzle

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

Sorry again for the only marginal relation to asterisk, but the issue does 
affect the voice performance I am experiencing, so I am soothing my guilt 
with that.

Bet you don't see this every day:

ast% uptime
  13:48:08 up 981 days, 18:29,  1 user,  load average: 1.08, 1.02, 1.01
ast%

I *REALLY* want this machine to see 1000 days uptime, if for nothing other 
than bragging rights.  Its been through mysql and asterisk upgrades, a 
horrible hacking nightmare that very nearly made me reboot, and several 
power outages where the batteries lasted JUST long enough to keep her up.

After all of this, I find I may have to reboot after all.  Because there 
is a !$@#% process running, consuming 100% CPU (note the load average), 
and I cannot seem to kill it:

ast% ps auxw | grep modprobe
root     17744 99.9  0.0  2688  412 ?        RN   Nov03 23223:01 modprobe 
-r ipt_state
ast% ps ealx | grep modprobe | grep -v grep
4     0 17744     1  39  19  2688  412 -      RN   ?        23223:38 
modprobe -r ipt_state
ast% sudo kill 17744
ast% sudo kill 17744
ast% sudo kill -9 17744
ast% sudo kill -9 17744
ast% !ps
ps ealx | grep modprobe | grep -v grep
4     0 17744     1  39  19  2688  412 -      RN   ?        23224:41 
modprobe -r ipt_state
ast%

You may also notice that I tried "renice" to bump it all the way to +19 
and still it consumes 100% of the CPU.  The result for asterisk is that I 
hear bits of robot noise during conversations, which is annoying as hell 
but not neccessarily show stopping.  But for another 19 days??  Argg!

I assume that because it is 'modprobe' it has tickled some kernel bug that 
is merrily spinning away and won't respond to interrupts.  I even tried to 
stop it with gdb and strace, both of which also hung and had to be killed 
with -9.

It seems to be related to me screwing with the iptables a few weeks ago.

Any ideas other than rebooting?

Cheers,

j