[tech] Process ulimits on Mussel and Martello

[Adrian Woodley]

  Heaven help us if medical doctors start using engineering practice.

On 02/01/11 22:34, Duncan Sargeant wrote:
> Proper engineer practice calls for you to use a fork bomb to refine 
> the limit to a suitable value  ... *grin*
>
> ,dunc
>
> On 1 February 2011 14:42, David Adam <zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au 
> <mailto:zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au>> wrote:
>
>     So a certain genius who will remain nameless decided to see if a
>     forkbomb
>     would work on Mussel. Apparently this is no longer deserving of an
>     account
>     locking, but as it's not the first time in recent years I decided
>     it was
>     probably time we did something about it.
>
>     /etc/security/limits.conf on Mussel and Martello has been set with
>     a soft
>     limit of 4096 processes on all user accounts. getrlimit(2) informs
>     me that
>     on Linux this enforces a limit of 4096 threads per real UID.
>     That's still
>     enough to build Mozilla Firefox and run my screen session, and
>     it's a soft
>     limit anyway so if you're really struggling you can just bump it
>     up with
>     `ulimit -u onezillion` or whatever.
>
>     4096 was a number I pulled out of the air; there is little to no
>     science
>     behind it and is not intended to stand up to malicious attacks.
>     There are
>     still at least a thousand ways of exhausting resources on
>     multiuser Linux
>     systems anyway.
>
>     David Adam
>     UCC Wheel Member
>     zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au <mailto:zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/tech/attachments/20110203/9de423e2/attachment.htm