Re: luser beeing able to kill random root owned procs (linux 2.2.20) ?

From: Samu (samuat_private)
Date: Sat Nov 10 2001 - 09:11:07 PST

  • Next message: Patryk Chmielewski: "Segfault in seejpeg 1.10"

    On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 04:55:52PM -0800, rpc wrote:
    > On Wed, 1 Jan 1997, Ralf Dreibrodt wrote:
    > > Hi,
    > > >while running "vi `perl -e 'print "." x 90000000'`" on
    > > >a 2.2.20 linux kernel as a normal user, I've noticed:
    > > >forsaken:~$ dmesg
    > > >VM: killing process snmpd
    > > >forsaken:~$ uname -rs
    > > >Linux 2.2.20
    > > >snmpd was running as root (this machine has 64MBytes of RAM)
    > > the user is not allowed to kill a process owned by root, the user is allowed
    > > to use all RAM (and probably swap).
    > >
    > > you can test whether he is allowed to and what will happen, when you execute
    > > something like this:
    > >
    > > while true; do temp=$(echo temp$temp$temp$temp); done
    > 
    > No, this is an artifact of Rik van Riel's OOM (out of memory) Kill code of
    > the linux VM. When system resources are low, a process is chosen with a
    > 'badness' algorithm (oom_kill.c in the kernel source tree).
    
    it always a good idea to set system limit per users (ulimit) which lets
    you to avoid DOS from local user: for example there was this beautifoul piece
    of code on to an attachment of a guy ... :(){:|:&};: which cause to gain all system resources and freeze your machine ... .  with ulimit you can avoid problems depended from ppl trying to catch all system resources and so avoid that problem you specify.
    
    Samuele 
    
    -- 
    Samuele Tonon  <samuat_private>   http://www.linuxasylum.net/~samu/
              	Acid -- better living through chemistry.
    			       Timothy Leary
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Nov 10 2001 - 10:14:25 PST