David Curry said: > The thing about hackers, though, is that only they know what it is they > want to do. A fork bomb may be a lesser risk than something else, but > it is nevertheless a risk that many newcomers to linux are unaware of. At the point that a malicious person can run any arbitrary process on your machine you no long have control over it, regardless if they are able to fork bomb the machine or not. Basing an argument on what someone can do after you have been hacked doesn't make sense. Should we take away wget because after you have been hacked someone can use it to download more evil code? Or bash, because the hacker can make scripts? > A better practice would be to set installatioin defaults at levels that > will clearly support installation of the OS, make those default > installation values known to the ops, and expect ops to address the > resource allocation issue at time of installation. Which leads to a bunch of people complaining about the defaults having to be changed. You yourself commented in another thread about having to change the defaults for sound settings was an "irritating PITA". >> To use your car analogy, would you expect to buy a car and have it's >> speed limited to 35 MPH, because that is the speed limit on the street >> you bought it? >> > I expect a car to run at idling speed in neutral gear until I as an op > decide to use more of the resource available. At which time, as an op I > allocate more resources by putting the vehicle into gear and provide more > fuel to accelerate. Unfortunately, what would happen in the real world would be a bunch of posts to this list along the lines of "how do I get my car to move" and "well, I never had to do that with my Microsoft car, these Linux cars suck". And the the associated CARnews articles about how the Fedora car is horrible because you have to put it in gear instead of just going. You can't have it both ways. If people have enough knowledge to change an arbitrarily low limit, they also have enough knowledge to adjust a higher limit (assuming they need it in their particular situation). Again, to quote Dave Jones: "...it solves one problem and brings a lot of new ones." -- William Hooper
