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Date:      Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:04:09 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: ulimit...
Message-ID:  <v04011706b1a5d8932b5c@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <357FDD32.F5DBD872@camtech.net.au>
References:  <199806102040.QAA07676@auchroisk.pdl.cs.cmu.edu> <357F25D4.524A6BC6@ver1.telmex.net.mx>

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At 11:05 PM +0930 6/11/98, Matthew Thyer wrote:
> Administrators of large multiuser systems expect these kind of
> limits to be on by default for 'ordinary users'.
>
> Dont most vendors UNIXes have limits on by default ?
>
> The single user workstation machine has the one power user that
> can afford to get bitten once by this for the knowledge it gains
> them.

I'm new to running my own FreeBSD systems, and in fact I just
got bit by these resource limits while doing something yesterday.
While it was inconvenient, I do think it's better to have the
limits set at "reasonable" levels and let people run into them,
then to not have them set.

Say you do have someone who writes a fork-bomb by mistake (that
often happens in our systems programming class when students
write their first program that calls fork()...).  A real run-away
program can kill off the entire system -- and then you don't
really know *why* the system went haywire.  Having a single
user run into a limit is better than having the entire system
come to a standstill.  And now that I know about /etc/login.conf,
it looks pretty interesting.

Note that in my case, the machine is basically a one-person
machine, but still I preferred running into the limit on one
session than having a system-wide problem.

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn           =   gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer          or  drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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