ok.... i use slackware, but i always readup on the gentoo newsletter, just cause it is good reading. now, the thing this week that was fun was the forkbomb test. putting in ){ :|:& };: into a term as user and crashing my system. that is all cool, but the fix is to, as root, ulimit -u 30. or however many. but when i run that and i check with ulimit -a i see it has changed to 30. but then i run the script as user and bam, teh system goes down. the processes shoot up over 3000 and boom. y wont this work on slackware 10.1.... ?

Might I remind that Slack is the closest to FreeBSD. Probably that's the reason

slackerLX says that slack is close to freebsd, but freebsd isnt effected. my box is. the link left by jong357 led me to the same thing that i tried, in a terminal as root i issue:

ulimit -u 30

to cut the number of processes a user can run to 30. then i check it with ulimit -a and it confirms that max processes per user is 30. but when i issue the command, my system is still taken down.

i opend a term and ran top then another term and ran the forkbomb, and i saw the processes skyrocket. in the thousands, then lockup. the command is supposed to help, but doesnt.,.. i cant figure out y...

Are you sure you execute the fork bomb at the same shell you executed ulimit -u 30 ?

well yeah, cause i didnt have x running the first time. just on the default console..

Could you try as normal user:

ahh... that worked, but y didnt it work when i did it as root? and will that work on all users of my system if i only put it in on my login?

You could put ulimit -u 30 in /etc/profile so the setting is applied to
all users but 30 is very limited in my opinion

(I am now under KDE and top shows me that 100 processes are currently running)

[edit]
100 processes are being used but 2 are running and 98 sleeping
anyway I need at least 150/200 processes IHMO

That's why I posted the link instead of repeating what was said on the second page of that thread. That seemed to be the solution... Putting it in /etc/profile or each users ~/.bash_profile implied that ulimit would get set for everyone as soon as they logged in to their shell.

thats y i dont use kde... i have enlightenment and i am running 35 processes right now with 1 user. 3 running and the rest sleeping. so, yeah 30 is pretty limited, i was just giving it a shot. i only see over 100 procs when i open a kde program, like k3b. i just dont like the slow speed of kde is all. it effects everything. with kde, glxgears gives me 1000 fps on the default res.. but with enlightenment i get 1700 fps with default res.. with fluxbox it is even faster, but i like some eye candy. anyway, i will probably use more like 200, cuase i do alot of video and dvd stuff. i never see more than 200, ever so. i might make it 300 just in case.. ill try editing the profile file, can anyone give me an example of what part to edit... i have never messed with the profile file. thanks for the link. i must have missed the solution somewhere.

Just add ulimit -u 300 (for example) at the end of /etc/profile,
say after the last line to be sure

the forkbomb " :(){ :|:& };: " didn't seem to work here ?
so i did ":(){ :& };: "

now my pc is still as usable as allways, but the proc is running at 100 % .
i tried " killall : " as root but it won't stop.
how can i kill it ?

egag

Hm, does "killall -9 name-of-app" make a difference?

i got it stopped now.
i saw a "bash" in the sysguard with an upgoing pid.

so i typed " kill <pid+100>" and repeated " enter-arrow_up " as fast as i could.
then i had luck.
i'm not gonna start it now again, but i'll try tomorrow.
there should be a decent way to stop it....

egag