“forkbomb it”I’ll admit that I thought his statement was pretty funny. How did this guy expect to bring down a Linux machine by fork bombing it as a non-root user? Not being as intimately familiar with the various Linux distributions as I am with the three BSDs, I figured that I’d have a quick peek into his claim and see what happens.
I wrote up a very simple bourne shell script on my work machine, which runs Mandrake Linux, and executed it under my non-privileged account. Within seconds, the machine was brought to its knees — totally crippled and unusable. I stared at my screen in disbelief for a few moments, totally stunned with what had just happened.
After the deer-in-headlights look had left my face, I gave my head a shake and started to question my belief that none of the BSD machines that I administer were susceptible to this truly ancient attack. I’ll admit that I held my breath for a few seconds as I keyed the script into my NetBSD laptop, and then ran it. I was pleasantly surprised when the attack had no effect, confirming that I wasn’t losing my mind after all — limits had been put in place to prevent a normal user from crippling the entire system. Exactly as one would expect.
I then proceeded to fork bomb every Unix machine I could get my hands on […continues]
The subsequent discussion is quite amusing, where anonymous Linux weenies make well of course you should have gone in and set sensible resource limit defaults, its a user problem, not a Linux or Distro problem – in the face of the implicit critique that the *BSD operating systems are equipped with better, nicer defaults.
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