Re: forkbombing Linux distributions

[Peter Chubb]

>>>>> "William" == William Beebe <wbeebe@xxxxxxxxx> 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*
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