From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 23 13:15:50 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from polaris.internal.org (unknown [216.162.173.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A069537B479 for ; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 13:15:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (haroldp@localhost) by polaris.internal.org (8.9.3/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA62950 for ; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 13:15:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from haroldp@internal.org) Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 13:15:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Harold Paulson To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: login.conf Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, I recently had a FreeBSD box completely locked up when a typo in a web script ran the machine completely out of RAM/swap. It looks like login.conf is exactly what I need to set limits on various processes, but there are quite a few details that aren't sufficiently explained by the man pages. I haven't found any good answers to this in the archives, or on the web (or by cornering people at the Con). The upshot is that it looks like most of the FreeBSD servers on the net can be locked - at least locally - with one line of Perl/shell/PHP/etc script. Not really a good situation. If there is an expert out there that would be willing to answer some questions about login.conf, I'd be willing to test and write some documentation. I have questions like: what is 'stacksize' exactly, and how should the limit I set relate to RAM/swap? If I have X amount of RAM and I want to allow my important daemons to use almost, but not quite all of that, to what should I set the various properties? How can I make sure I always have enough resources left over to allow me to ssh in and fix stuff? How can I limit daemons like sendmail that must run as root? Please let me know if you can help. - H To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message