bigtomrodney

Hi, just something I noticed in 3.7 - I've been messing around with ulimit on my own Mandrake 10.1 box since I heard of the forkbomb 'vulnerability'. I've pretty much secured my box in most ways, but I ran a fork script in a few live distros to see the effects. Knoppix goes down prettty quickly....

The thing to note is that Knoppix is Debian based, and Debian had user limits enforced so in theory Knoppix shouldn't have went down. The developer must have inadvertently removed the ulimit argument from /etc/profile

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Knoppix fan, and I'm certainly not pointing fingers, I just thought it was something worth mentioning. Really anyone running a box should add in the ulimit argument to their /etc/profile to stop theoretical 'inconveniences' from forkbombs...

Any thoughts? Am I being overprotective?

Vergil83

no I wouldn't say overprotective(although it is unlikely to concern most) , we should never get into the thinking that GNU/Linux systems are perfect.

But I am sitting pretty with debian running :P

for those whom don't know what it is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forkbomb

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bigtomrodney

Yeah, it's a community thing I guess that I even brought it up, I'd hate to be scaremongering - just keeping the information flow open. After all, what could be worse than hiding a problem?

BTW Dig the Curious George, got the same one. :rock: