ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Derek <661494@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: x11-apps

Recently, I discovered a system that had been completely shut down for a rather ridiculous reason.
Over a period of 21 hours, a user's .xsession-filled with the following:
============================
Starting Oracle Universal Installer...
Checking installer requirements...
Checking operating system version: must be redhat-4, redhat-5, SuSE-9 or SuSE-10 Passed
All installer requirements met.
Checking Temp space: must be greater than 400 MB.   Actual 384320 MB    Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 512 MB.   Actual 7730MB    Passed
Checking monitor: must be configured to display at least 256 colors    Failed <<<<
    >>> Could not execute /usr/X11R6/bin/xdpyinfo
Checking if CPU speed is above 300 MHz.    Actual 2992 MHz    Passed

Some optional pre-requisite checks have failed (see above). Continue?
(y/n) [n] Continue? (y/n) [n] Continue? (y/n) [n] Continue? (y/n) [n]
Continue? (y/n) [n] Continue? (y/n) [n]

... repeat that last portion about 20 billion times, approximately
256,000 repetitions of the phrase per second, until:

# ls -lh .xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 1000 1000 373G 2010-08-26 13:11 .xsession-errors

Now.  I have looked into the history of this, and I've noted that this
sort of thing happens periodically.  Users file a bug, and it is closed.

Now, I'm aware that this is obviously the fault of misbehaving apps...
But.
Is there any reason this couldn't be mitigated?

I've read elsewhere that right now the syntax for this file is xinit calling:
exec >"$ERRFILE" 2>&1

Could that not be changed to:
exec 2>&1 | head -c 5000000 > "$ERRFILE"

Or something similar?

Thanks!

** Affects: x11-apps (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
Request to limit xinit writes to .xsession-errors to some reasonable value, such as 10 megs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/661494
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X,
which is subscribed to x11-apps in ubuntu.