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In university we were taught C programming. We started with simple things like loops and stuff. After a while the topic processes, threads & stuff came up and of course we were instructed to use that.
In the computer lab there where only thin clients so everything actually ran on the server.
A good friend of mine - not know what was about to happen - entered:
while (true) { fork(); }Astoundingly it took a whole minute until the server froze. 🤣
That was the same server most of the school stuff ran on. So nearly everything went down. 😂
He got scolded by the sysadmin the next day but nothing serious happened.I'd scold the sysadmin instead for not cofiguring critical systems in a secure way. Ulimit exists for a reason.
Huh. I never made that connection before. I always thought ulimit was to prevent excessive disk writes or something
ulimit -H -u 10will (hard)limit the current process (the shell) to 10 subprocesses. You can also use it to limit the number of open files etc.To globally configure that for a user/group you'd use
/etc/security/limits.confinstead.If you want to prevent users from filling up the disk, take a look into quota.
What does that command do?
Creates a new process. So, it would create an infinite amount of processes filling RAM.
:(){ :|:& };:or (more clearly written):
function forkbomb() { forkbomb | forkbomb & ## background the process whilst recursing ## the pipe ensures that both instances are called at the same time, instead of waiting on the other ## without the pipe, you just get a linear increase in processes. Slow bomb. We want fast. }; forkbomb ## start it all off