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

[Michael C. Shultz]

On Thursday 27 October 2005 17:12, Carl Makin wrote:
> Morning All,
>
> 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.
>
>
> Carl.
>

Just a guess but it may be the software is opening too many files. Try 
installing /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof then while your program is running
run lsof -c {watever you program name is} +r5.  If you see screenfulls
of open files then thats the problem.

-Mike