Fork bombing a Linux machine as a non-root user

[Johnathan Bailes]

On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:03:38 +0800, Ow Mun Heng <Ow.Mun.Heng at wdc.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 15:25 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 03:18:00PM -0500, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> >
> >  > And yes there are tools available to help mitigate the potential problem
> >  > as you pointed out.  But why not set a default limit instead of leaving
> >  > it open?
> >
> > Because then we get flooded with "I cant run two copies of openoffice, wtf?",
> > "concurrent users of ftpd downloading iso's or other large files goes bang"
> > and many other similar bugs.
> 
> But shouldn't there be some sane limit already applied? As a normal
> user, I believe having ~300 user proceses would be more than enough?
> 
> Why not ship it with a reasonable sane limit? 1000 perhaps?
> 

Typically I would say this is not needed.  Usually I would say that
linux or other *Nixes typically do not try to baby the user or admin,
it assumes the exact opposite of windows, in essence that you have a
clue of what you are doing.

But .... considering the bad press a sane very high limit might be
nice.  Then again if you can fire off processes on a box you can
always find a way to bring it to its knees.

Also, due to a flaw in like awstats for example a cracker did bring a
guy's box to its knees by gaining access on the box (non-root) and
forkbombing it.

I read the irc transcript of  his talk with the guy.  Actually kind of
interesting.  Crackers are such worthless toads.  Especially the
script kiddies.