Possible Hung Server?

["Heritage House '76, Inc." <mike@cybertrails.com>]

6/22/99

Up until a couple days ago, my Minivend 2.03 catalog was running fine.  I FTP'd
a new products.asc and pricing.asc out to it.  It still worked fine until I
FTP'd products.asc one more time.  It then gave the not so uncommon message:

We're sorry, the MiniVend server is unavailable...
We are out of service or may be experiencing high system demand, please try
again soon.

The web provider says that it's not an overloaded server.

I tried to reset the program, which I've done dozens of times, but got a bit of
a confusing message.  (resetting does not help at all)

My commands:

cd /usr/www/users/hhouse76/cgi-bin/minivend/bin
./restart

Server's message:

We couldn't immediately terminate the MiniVend server running
on PID 11518. The server is probably just waiting for a request,
but it is conceivable it was stopped by an error.

If your system has SYSV signals (like IRIX and Solaris), it
may be stopped already.  Wait at least 60 seconds (or make
a request to the catalog) and try this from the command line:

        kill 11518

It should complain about "no such process", which means the
server has stopped normally. If it does not (and you have
waited for the housekeeping timer to elapse) then it is hung.
Do:

        kill -9 11518
        rm -f minivend.pid

Configuring catalog hh76...
done.
The MiniVend server is already running (process id 11518)
hhouse76@omicron%                


When I follow the first instruction, to "kill 11518" or "kill -9 11518", I do
get the message that there is "no such process" which means it should have shut
the program down normally.  But then I get the message "The MiniVend server is
already running (process id 11518)"  which I don't believe I've seen before
when
I reset the program.  My question is, is there any way for me to know if my
program is hung and somehow not possible to reset.  Or am I barking up the
wrong tree?

The web provider only answers mail every other day or so, and I've got to get
this catalog back on line!

Minivend 2.03, running on Pair networks, Apache UNIX

Thanks!  Mike Monahan