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Date:      Wed, 12 Feb 1997 08:43:54 -0700 (MST)
From:      "Thomas S. Traylor" <ttraylor@titan.cs.mci.com>
To:        Snob Art Genre <ben@narcissus.ml.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: misc
Message-ID:  <Pine.OSF.3.95.970212083844.15155D-100000@titan.cs.mci.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970212063834.1085A-100000@narcissus.ml.org>

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On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, Snob Art Genre wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, Steve wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 11 Feb 1997, Alex Merkle wrote:
> > 
> > > What is the difference between FreeBSD and Linux?
> > > 
> > 
> > Not crashing almost ever, and crashing semi-frequently - repectively.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Actually, speaking of crashing, I stumbled across a bad fork-bomb by 
> accident tonight:
> 
> narcissus% cat /usr/local/bin/foo
> #!/bin/sh
> foo
> narcissus%

When I worked at a University, we had a student do something similar
to this on a VMSCluster.  Here is what was in his command file:

$ spawn/nowait foo
$ submit foo
$ @foo
$ exit

Needless to say we had to reboot the cluster to kill off everything.

> 
> This slowed my system to a crawl, filled up swap, and caused several
> processes to die.  The dead processes made X unhappy enough to lock up my
> machine.  Can anything be done (kernel config settings, etc.) to prevent
> stuff like this from happening? 

Side affects were the same as you mentioned.

We fixed it by disabling the student's account. But this wasn't the
way to keep it from happening again. :)

Tom

> 
> 
>  Ben
> 
> "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
> 
> 

--
Thomas Traylor
Thomas.Traylor@mci.com
ttraylor@titan.cs.mci.com
(719) 535-1269





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