Linux

Sometimes you cannot kill some processes via the regular command kill -9 PID When you list them with ps -aux you will see the entry defunct Those defunct processes are apparently still hanging around mostly because their parent application is waiting for them to receive something. These processes are already dead, that's why they are called "zombies". In order to kill them, you have to kill the parent application first. You can figure out what the parent's PID is by issuing pstree PID

On each computer on the network there is an NFS server running, starting at bootup (edit the runlevel to enable that). In Suse Linux, NFS shares can be configured in YAST (NFS server configuration) or directly in /etc/exports file. Don't configure the remote root to act as local root! Shares should be configured to be accessed only from the local network 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0. /media/downloads/ 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(root_squash,sync) UIDs have to be the same on all computers for the permissions to work properly.

I deleted my root directory in an attempt to delete a file that was starting with the character "/". A crash of konqueror had left such impossible file in some subdirectory of /tmp. As root I played with some regular expresssions to delete it, but only managed to delete my root directory. Not completely (as the excessive disk activity made my soon realize my mistake), but sufficiently beyond repair.