Re: forkbombing Linux distributions

Peter Chubb
2005-03-21T03:27:13Z

>>>>> "William" == William Beebe <wbeebe@gmail.com> writes:

William> Sure enough, I created the following script and ran it as a
William> non-root user:

William> #!/bin/bash $0 & $0 &

There are two approaches to fixing this.
1. Rate limit fork(). Unfortunately some legitimate usges do a lot
of forking, and you don't really want to slow them down.
2. Limit (per user) the number of processes allowed. This is what's
currently done; and if you as administrator want to you can set
RLIMIT_NPROC in /etc/security/limits.conf

On an almost-single-user system such as most desktops, there isn't much
point in setting this. On shared systems, it can be useful.

--
Dr Peter Chubb http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au peterc AT gelato.unsw.edu.au
The technical we do immediately, the political takes *forever*