Re: Local DoS : RedHat 6.0

[ras () SLARTIBARTFAST MAGRATHEA COM (Robert A. Seace)]

In the profound words of ~jim:
> Hello,
>
> I'm not sure if this problem has ever been addressed or not, but
> considering that I just spent a day recovering from a corrupted root
> partition (and this can be done by *any* user with window manager
> access), I thought this might be worth mentioning anyway.
>
> While killing yet another zombie Netscape process, I made the mistake of
> typing "kill -9 -1 <pid>" as opposed to the normal "kill -9 <pid>."  For
> obvious reasons, this attempted to kill every process owned by my user
> and hung the entire system in the process.  (aka. I couldn't even switch
> to another console to attempt recovery.)  Unfortunately the only way to
> recover was to "hard boot" the system and run the risk of corrupting my
> root partition in the process.  (Of course with my luck it corrupted.)
>
> I actually noticed this "bug" about a year ago, but since forgot about
> it.  From what I've experienced, it definitely happens when a user types
> "kill -9 -1" while in RedHat 6.0's Gnome/Enlightenment or Afterstep,
> however I haven't tested any other window managers or versions of Linux.

        Unless you were root at the time, I really doubt that it "hung
the entire system"...  I imagine it just forcably killed important
stuff like your X server, leaving your console in a wacked out state,
where you just couldn't do anything from it...  I've had that happen
before, on rare occasions...  Eg: the Unreal Tournament demo used to
sometimes totally screw up my console like that...  But, I was always
able to just telnet in from a different host and do a controlled reboot...
(There may be a way to reset things without even needing to reboot, but
that generally tends to be the quickest/easiest fix...  As detestable
and Microsoft-like as it may be... ;-))

        In any case, such a "DoS" would require console access, I'd
think...  And, if you've got console access, well, I think this is
not really the WORST thing you could do to the system, if you wanted
to, anyway... ;-)

--
||========================================================================||
|| Robert A. Seace ||               URL              || ras () magrathea com ||
||  AKA: Agrajag   || http://www.magrathea.com/~ras/ || rob () wordstock com ||
||========================================================================||
"Who was that?" "Who--the man with the five heads and the elderberry bush full
 of kippers?" "Yes." "I don't know. Just someone." "Ah." - THGTTG