Unix Tip: REBOOTING BECAUSE OF FORK BOMBS

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UNIX HOT TIP

Unix Tip 2899 - January 13, 2010

http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?tip.today

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REBOOTING BECAUSE OF FORK BOMBS

There is nothing more frustrating for an Administrator who has to reboot system due to fork bomb

(the number of processes in the system reaches the maximum limit when a user, even a superuser, tries to execute some command, the system will respond with Vfork failed)

In Solaris under SPARC, this can be controlled by specifying a line in /etc/system

set maxuprc=64

And reboot the system. Now a user can have maximum of 64 processes under his ownership. By default the 'maxuprc' value is 16*maxusers - 5 where 'maxusers' is another tunable parameter in /etc/system

Caution : You should have a backup of /etc/system file before you make the changes. So that you can revert back to old system file using boot -a option in case of inconsistent system file.

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