What fork-bombed?

fouldragon at aol.com fouldragon at aol.com
Wed Jul 25 17:57:33 MST 2007


So I come into work today, and the webserver we operate (we do web 
development for about two dozen clients) is unresponsive and "weird".  
SSH won't connect, then it will.  Basic commands (ls!) bitch about too 
many open files.  And Plesk can't even tell me how much memory is free 
all the time.

Eventually, I'm able to get the machine rebooted, and all returns to 
normal.  But before it went reset, I noticed a hell of a lot of

/usr/lib/pkgconfig/../../bin/mono /usr/lib/pkgconfig

in the 'ps ax' command.  My conclusion:  Something fork-bombed and ate 
up all the available open-file handles.

Any thoughts as to what would cause that command line?  Maybe it was 
truncated to fit the terminal, but what would try to call its way out 
of the pkgconfig directory?  And how do I prevent it from recurring?

Box is Fedora Core 4.  The only .net stuff we have, to my knowledge, is 
a few .aspx pages we developed for testing, then decided it was better 
to use a windows development host for people who wanted to host their 
final sited on Windows.
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