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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: How to set ulimit in SysV
Message-ID: <30554@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 10-Oct-87 01:44:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.30554
Posted: Sat Oct 10 01:44:58 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Oct-87 03:36:36 EDT
References: <6497@oliveb.UUCP> <142700003@tiger.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Lines: 45

>   That is not a bug.  Its a feature!!!  :-)  Seriously, init was not
> meant to start up shell scripts....

What?  This is nonsense.  Note the following line, from the S5R2 "inittab":

	rc::wait:/etc/rc 1>/dev/console 2>&1 #run com

"/etc/rc" sure looks like a shell script to me....

> If you want to raise the ulimit for login sessions, GET THE SOURCE to
> /bin/login and put the ulimit call in there before it setuid's and execs
> the shell.

Give me a break.  Most people these days don't *have* the source to UNIX, and
most of them have better things to do with what could be up to $53,000.  Saying
"you can fix this by tweaking the source" may be useful for some people as a
workaround, but it hardly indicates that there's nothing wrong.

>   "terribly broken and a major oversight"????  Sorry, I bet they did not
> know that you had an INFINITE amount of space available and were not
> concerned with limiting it.  Since I bet somehow that you do not have
> an infinite space, you probably DO need a limiter.  You setting it to
> -1 proves the fact that you are not infallible and might screw up again!!!

More nonsense.  First of all, there are many sites that have *sufficient* disk
space that a per-file disk space limit is not useful; many of those sites are
running applications that want to handle large files, and don't want to have to
cook up some kludge to run those applications with a sane file size limit.
Second of all, a file size limit is certainly not the ONLY way to control disk
space usage - unless, of course, you're stuck with an OS that doesn't offer
e.g. per-user disk quotas.  Many UNIX users *do* have systems that support disk
quotas.  Disk quotas more deal more directly with the problem, by giving a user
a certain number of disk blocks, and leaving it up to *them* to choose how to
use them; if they have 10MB, and want an 8MB file and a bunch of small files,
they can do so.

Face it: many, many people have complained about 1MB ulimits.  Many, many real
live sites find it to interfere with their ability to use the system.  It's
just a damn shame that the default ulimit wasn't made a tunable parameter until
System V Release 3.1; fortunately, there are plenty of systems out there that
don't stick you with this, and many of them even give you disk quotas to
provide different and, in many ways, better ways of solving the problem.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com