From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 12 07:44:51 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA05041 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 07:44:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from titan.cs.mci.com (titan.cs.mci.com [166.37.6.15]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id HAA05035 for ; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 07:44:45 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost by titan.cs.mci.com; (5.65v3.2/1.1.8.2/22Aug96-0234PM) id AA02200; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 08:43:55 -0700 Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 08:43:54 -0700 (MST) From: "Thomas S. Traylor" To: Snob Art Genre Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: misc In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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