Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!amdahl!pacbell!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: ulimit (was: getty/login for callback)
Message-ID: <8305@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 26 Apr 89 18:09:07 GMT
References: <836@twwells.uucp> <4428@ihuxz.ATT.COM> <545@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 32

In article <545@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> lyndon@nexus.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:

>>It is not difficult at all for the administrator to set a higher
>>ulimit for users that have a legitimate need, ESPECIALLY is you have
>>source to the login program.

>That's a pretty damn big ESPECIALLY. Are you aware of the price your
>company charges for that source code? If I was running a commercial
>shop, instead of paying a small fortune for source, I would put the
>money to better use buying more drives for the disk farm.

Or perhaps an OS that provides per-user disk quotas (and a machine
to run it on.. [notice the lack of a smiley here])

>>If you had ever been an administrator in a software development
>>environment you would see the demonstrated need for the ulimit.

Well, no, but you might see the need for quotas or the need to
repartition your disks to provide the development environment
for each project.

>...Well I say, "When the
>ulimit reaches the file size limit, what is the point of having
>ulimit?" 

It's not a bad concept, and it's now  a tunable, but it's not a
quota system and you can't rely on it to keep you out of trouble.
I suspect the real reason it exists is to keep people who
do not have appropriate cron entries from filling their disks
with the wtmp, cronlog, sulog etc. files.

Les Mikesell