fork bomb attack

[Thomas Hille]

Am Samstag, den 19.03.2005, 15:20 +0100 schrieb Kyrre Ness Sjobak:

<snip>

> 
> But bugs in (preinstalled) system software has also been known to cause
> a resource exhaustion. I had cups do this to me once (try sending a 400
> mb postscript to gimpprint on a 128 MB RAM computer), or print to a
> remote machine called "localhost" - thats effectively a forkbomb...

That's what I wanted to point out in my previous post: you can bring the
system down with 2 processes (or some other way) while having a running
system with several thousand processes, that does it's job.

-Thomas