hello

i've decided to learn to secure a linux box so i'm making a list of things to do.

it's really easy to bring a system down to a crawl by using up all the ram or processor. can i limit those? i guess the processor is not as important since it's shared equally among all users but still...

also, to prevent a forkbomb i would like to limit the number of processes a user may run.

i looked at the man page for limits and found something awfull in there :
i don't think that's funny.

is there a way to limit the number of logins? ssh or telnet?

thank you

Try /etc/security/limits.conf which is used by pam_limits.

thanks for the suggestion. apparently slackware doesn't have pam.

i was thinking of that though. what does authentication have to do with quotas?

is it reasonable to try and install it myself?

There are some runtime configuration parameters (a.k.a. sysctl's) in /proc/sys/*/*
Check their descriptions at:
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysctl/*
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt

Unfortunately, these files haven't been updated...

They will probably use sysctl's

There are many ways... See sshd_config(5)