Comments on: Reboot Linux using simple fork()

By: Border

Border — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:43:49 +0000

Fork bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

By: vandit

vandit — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:50:38 +0000

Hey so you are writing on linux lately …. good job man …

By: forking

forking — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 14:37:30 +0000

I guess nobody told you that this is fork bomb

hahaha…

People like to show how stupid they are by repeating before reading what other ppl commented.

By: Brian Vincent

Brian Vincent — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:06:44 +0000

Odd. I thought Linux was immune to this going way back to the 2.0 days. I used to do this A LOT on Solaris when I was in college. The labs would be completely full and there wouldn’t be a machine to get on. I’d log in remotely from a PC into machines until I found one where the user was sitting on IRC or playing nettrek. Then I’d just crash his machine. Nine times out of 10 he’d just get up and go home rather than sit there and wait for the slow reboot.

I thought I remembered trying it on Linux at some point and not having it work.

By: Christian Decker

Christian Decker — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:36:22 +0000

About the simplest denial of service attack one could think of

By: F.

F. — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:35:47 +0000

Not much of a news. It’s called fork bomb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb). Some Linux distributions come with limits configured ( limits.conf somewhere under /etc ) that prevents this from happening, some probably don’t have one configured. I guess yours doesn’t have.
F.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:10:33 +0000

Why not the old standby?

int main(){for(;;)fork();}

Does the printf help anything?

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:41:38 +0000

This is known as a forkbomb. Google it to find some fun implementations!

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:40:07 +0000

Fork bomb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

By: Lew

Lew — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:11:53 +0000

Dude, you’ve just reinvented (poorly) the “fork bomb” (look it up in Google).

This sort of attack has been known for decades, and (unless your Linux system is very misconfigured) will not reboot the system. I suggest that, instead of a “sure way to force a reboot”, you’ve just (re)discovered a “sure way to determine whether or not your Linux system was competently installed and managed”.

Your “exposure” is more a damnation of your system administrators, than it is a flaw in Linux.