Internet Connect Daemon?

[tetsuo]

I have a horrible connection through the phone line in my apartment... I frequently get kicked offline due to line noise etc... Under OS X (10.0) when this happens one of three things occurs... 1. Kernel Panic (Sucks) 2. Internet Connect error (can recover and redial) 3. I lose my connection, but internet connect tells me I am disconnecting but never completes this disconnection task so I can re-connect upon a force-quit/kill I restart internet connect and it still says disconnecting. (then sometimes when I try to reboot the machine the kernel panic then happens...) What I am asking is on the the 3rd instance I described above how would I properly kill my PPP connect so I can re-connect without rebooting?? When this happens a root process names Slpdload has a status of Zombie... any idea what this means???

Any help's appriciated


Dual 500 G4 256Ram Using the v.90 protocol

 

[JSR COUT]

A zombie is a process that has no parent. Under normal circumstances when a child process is spawned the parent process uses the wait() system call to get the exit status of the child. The flow of events looks somthing like this:

fork()
exec(CHILD); excute the child
wait()

If for some reason the parent process is killed before the child has completed, the child won't be able to report it's exit code when it is finished. Hence the child becomes a zombie. I've seen instances where buggy code has spawned 100's of zombies. On most unix boxes a zombie will not consume any system resources with the exception of an entry in the process table.