[Mageia-dev] forkbomb protection

Sun Mar 10 20:20:34 CET 2013

David Walser wrote:
+> I saw an article this morning on LinuxToday that reminded me of the famous shell forkbomb that most of you are probably aware of (I became 
+aware of it several years ago from someone's e-mail signature on a mailing list):
+> http://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/an-eleven-character-linux-denial-of-service-attack-how-to-defend-against-it/
+> 
+> This also reminded me that we don't have protection against this out of the box in Mageia.
+> 
+> I checked on Fedora, and it turns out they do, as described here:
+> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=432903
+> 
+> Their pam package has a /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf file that has:
+> # Default limit for number of user's processes to prevent
+> # accidental fork bombs.
+> # See rhbz #432903 for reasoning.
+> 
+> *        soft    nproc    1024
+> 
+> As the last comment on the bug says, it's a bit confusing that it's in limits.d/ and not the limits.conf file itself, and in fact I'm not 
+sure what is responsible for processing limits.d/* as limits.conf says nothing about it (Fedora's is the exact same as ours).  Anyway, one 
+way or another it would be nice to have this limit set by default on Mageia, IMHO.  WDYT?
+
+I added this exactly as Fedora has in pam-1.1.6-4.mga3.  Let me know if it causes problems or doesn't work.
+
+