breakmybox

Break your box. Simple!

"Break My Box" aims to be a helpful tool on testing system administrator skills on various issues (some weirder than others).

Feel free to add or suggest your own issues.

At the moment, the script can trigger the following issues:

OS problems:

• nomorepids - Decreases drastically the number of available PIDs, leaving the box unable to create further processes. This is done by writing a low value into /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max

File system problems:

• tmf (too many files) - Fills a partition with temporary small files until the filesystem runs out of inodes;
• ldf (large deleted file) - Creates a file with a specified size and then deletes so the space is kept in use until the process reading it is killed.

Funny problems:

• chmod - Remove execute permissions from chmod, creating a paradox.