Network Security Hacks

Enforce User and Group Resource Limits

Make sure resource-hungry users don’t bring down your entire system.

Whether it’s through malicious intent or an unintentional slip, having a user bring your system down to a slow crawl by using too much memory or CPU time is no fun at all. One popular way of limiting resource usage is to use the ulimit command. This method relies on a shell to limit its child processes, and it is difficult to use when you want to give different levels of usage to different users and groups. Another, more flexible way of limiting resource usage is with the PAM module pam_limits.

pam_limits is preconfigured on most systems that have PAM installed. All you should need to do is edit /etc/security/limits.conf to configure specific limits for users and groups.

The limits.conf configuration file consists of single-line entries describing a single type of limit for a user or group of users. The general format for an entry is:

            domain    type    resource    value

The domain portion specifies to whom the limit applies. Single users may be specified here by name, and groups can be specified by prefixing the group name with an @. In addition, the wildcard character * may be used to apply the limit globally to all users except for root. The type portion of the entry specifies whether the limit is a soft or hard resource limit. Soft limits may be increased by the user, whereas hard limits can be changed only by root. There are many types of resources that can be specified for the ...