Proper engineer practice calls for you to use a fork bomb to refine the limit to a suitable value ... *grin*<div><br></div><div>,dunc<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 1 February 2011 14:42, David Adam <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:zanchey@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au">zanchey@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">So a certain genius who will remain nameless decided to see if a forkbomb<br>
would work on Mussel. Apparently this is no longer deserving of an account<br>
locking, but as it's not the first time in recent years I decided it was<br>
probably time we did something about it.<br>
<br>
/etc/security/limits.conf on Mussel and Martello has been set with a soft<br>
limit of 4096 processes on all user accounts. getrlimit(2) informs me that<br>
on Linux this enforces a limit of 4096 threads per real UID. That's still<br>
enough to build Mozilla Firefox and run my screen session, and it's a soft<br>
limit anyway so if you're really struggling you can just bump it up with<br>
`ulimit -u onezillion` or whatever.<br>
<br>
4096 was a number I pulled out of the air; there is little to no science<br>
behind it and is not intended to stand up to malicious attacks. There are<br>
still at least a thousand ways of exhausting resources on multiuser Linux<br>
systems anyway.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
David Adam<br>
UCC Wheel Member<br>
<a href="mailto:zanchey@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au">zanchey@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au</a><br>
</font></blockquote></div><br></div>