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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: How do you make your UNIX crash ???
Message-ID: <1991Mar18.052757.24460@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 91 05:27:57 GMT
Article-I.D.: athena.1991Mar18.052757.24460
References: <690@tndsyd.oz.au> <513@bria> <1991Mar12.132003.27383@cs.widener.edu> <7959@tyrell.gtc.de> <1991Mar16.195916.26282@infoac.rmi.de>
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In article <1991Mar16.195916.26282@infoac.rmi.de>, siebeck@infoac.rmi.de (Wolfgang Siebeck ) writes:
|> what about
|> 
|> # rm -f /dev/kmem

  All of the other suggestions which discussed writing to /dev/kmem assume
that the device /dev/kmem is world-writeable.

  Your suggestion assumes that the directory /dev is world-writeable, which is
a completely different thing.

  In any case, I'm not even convinced that removing /dev/kmem will cause a
Unix system to crash.  The kernel itself doesn't use /dev/kmem; the device is
used only by processes that want to get access to kernel memory.  Deleting
/dev/kmem will simply prevent those processes (e.g. ps, ofiles) from working
properly.  Not a catastrophic failure by any standard.

-- 
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