A fork bomb creates processes repeatedly until server resources are exhausted. WHM’s Shell Fork Bomb Protection applies limits to shell users to reduce the damage from this type of accidental or deliberate activity.
Before you begin
You need WHM access with permission to manage the feature. Review whether legitimate shell tasks need higher process or resource limits before changing the setting.
This protection is aimed at users with terminal access. It does not provide a separate resource policy for every website, daemon or root-owned service.
Enable protection
- Log in to WHM.
- Open Security Center > Shell Fork Bomb Protection.
- Check whether protection is already enabled.
- If disabled, click Enable Protection.
- Confirm that the page now offers Disable Protection, indicating that protection is enabled.
Check normal shell tasks
Open a new shell session for a representative account and check that its usual tasks still work. Review resource-limit errors if a legitimate application cannot start the processes it needs.
Do not test protection by running a fork bomb on a live server. If the standard limits interfere with required work, ask the server administrator to review the specific workload and limit rather than disabling protection without investigation.