On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Martin Baehr wrote:
for sTeam this problem is rather serious. since we allow users to execute pike code (we can, because we have a security system) crashbugs like these will allow any prankster to kill our servers.
it's less of a problem for caudium or roxen because of the lack of a security system only trusted users should be executing pike code anyways.
ludger, tom, is there any way we can catch people trying to crash sTeam this way?
You can't "catch" a segfault, all we can do is restarting the server from another task. Since all Statuschanges are persistent in sTeam that doesn't hurt too much. For this reason a malicious program in an endlessloop is the bigger risk to a system like sTeam. Thats our main reason, why we put such a feature on the wish list on the last pike conference. ("A save way to remove one thread from outside the thread itselve"), this would allow to do some housekeeping on userthreads and remove them e.g. after some time limit.
--- Ludger
greetings, martin.