Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!mills
From: mills@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Gary Mills)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: SCSI thanks, wild user processes
Message-ID: <1991May31.154530.1327@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Date: 31 May 91 15:45:30 GMT
References: <1991May30.210639.17442@csl.dl.nec.com>
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Lines: 36

In <1991May30.210639.17442@csl.dl.nec.com> harrison@csl.dl.nec.com (Mark Harrison) writes:

>Another question:  We recently had a system crash due to
>a user running a shell script that accidentally invoked
>itself.

>Is there

>1.  A way to keep this from crashing the system?

You could do something like this, which we invoke from /etc/rc.local

#!/bin/sh
#kpatch: apply local patches to the running kernel
#	set max per-user processes to 200

N=/vmunix
D=/dev/mem

adb -w -k $N $D <<\EOF
maxuprc/W 0t200
$q
EOF

#!/end

>2.  If the system has crashed, to determine that
>    this was the reason?

If you have a dump, looking at the process table with ``ps'' should
show hundreds of copies of the shell script running.

>We are running SunOS 4.1.1.

-- 
-Gary Mills-         -Networking Group-          -U of M Computer Services-