How to stop Fork Bomb in Debian

[jw013]

The reason I mentioned PAM is because it is a low level service that handles much of the authentication and other security measures on most Linux systems, and it has replaced / extended a lot of functionality formerly provided by other configuration files. Sometimes when settings don't seem to get applied, it is because PAM is not configured to use them. For example, I'm pretty sure (although I could be wrong) editing /etc/securetty by itself on my system doesn't do anything - I need to add the pam_securetty module in my pam settings for securetty settings to be applied b/c PAM has replaced that functionality. In your case, PAM was set up correctly - it was your limits.conf that was incorrect.

If you want to learn more about PAM, you could start with the wikipedia page, or try this guide. The manual pages are also very useful. Start with man pam, then maybe pam.conf, and if you're interested, anything else that starts with pam_ for the various pam modules you can use.

[bkpsusmitaa]

Thanks, will get back to you after I have read the mentioned documents.

By the way, the system is giving anticipated response when we use the user terminal to put the Fork Bomb code, but still hangs when root terminal is used.