Smiley of Death

[Álvaro Reguly]

Hi, I am haivng server lockups, load goes to the sky and the server locks up.

afete auditing what users have been doing, I found out that one user was trying this out:

:(){ :|:&};:

How do I prevent this from locking up the server ? Obvioulsy the user was doing something that he was not suppoused to do, but anyway, the server should be able to handle it.

What can I do ?

Thanks

[kosmosik]

it is a fork bomb
set your users processes and processor usage limits.

[Álvaro Reguly]

How do I do that? Doing so, will not prevent users from running their normal tasks ? (e-mail, X11, etc)

Thanks

[kosmosik]

utemper afair is for setting limits. you can set limits on number of proccesses allowed (new processes wont start if they exceed given number) and ammount of ram per user. you must tweak a little to get it working and not disturb users with their work. I think 30 processes and some RAM will do that...

[Álvaro Reguly]

limits.conf heh ? thanks!

[Jman]

Note: don't run the above. It slows your machine to a crawl. I tried it.

[kosmosik]

you can run it on mine as user :P

[kosmosik]

OFF-TOPIC apropos running things on friends machine - Linux rox I have converted 3 people to use Linux with one floppy (Anaconda and unattended installs rulez) and some of mine own time to do some ssh and administering theirs machines

[Álvaro Reguly]

Originally Posted by Jman

Note: don't run the above. It slows your machine to a crawl. I tried it.

Well, I did not even think of telling people not to run it, as it is stated that it locks up your machine if it is not correctly set up.