Easy way to kill a 5.x/6.x box as a basic user.

[Igor Sysoev]

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Carl Makin wrote:

> I've been playing with some GIS software and 32Mb TIFF images.  Running 
> ImageMagick's "convert" utility  under my normal user login to convert the 
> image to gif or jpeg blows away the system every time.  No panic seen on the 
> console and no core dump found, the system just quietly reboots.  Upon reboot 
> /var is full and corrupt and takes ages for the background fsck to fix it so 
> I normally boot into single user mode and do it myself.
>
> Is anyone else seeing this?  I can happily supply an image that causes the 
> problem if someone wants to try it.

It's known problem:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/67919

And there is bandaid patch by Uwe Doering that at least allows
to keep system alive:
http://freebsd.rambler.ru/bsdmail/freebsd-stable_2004/msg03698.html

I'd applied this patch year ago on one of our production servers,
and the bug was gone. However, no one wants to commit this patch.


Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/