I think someone decided to forkbomb it. I'm still logged on and every external command I type gets me "bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable".

This is why we can't have nice things.

I was in there 5 minutes ago, did cat /levels/level02.c and then it stopped responding. I don't think cat could crash the server, but if it did, I'm sorry?

pretty sure it wasn't you. but then again, you never know with cats.

cat considered harmful?

To be clear, I'm making a joke riffing on the seminal paper "cat -v considered harmful".

I am. I think their server must be overloaded. I bookmarked the blog post announcing this and I'm going to try again tomorrow.

Yeah, we're rebooting. Should be up in a few more minutes. Sorry about that.

For anyone building something similar, I imagine having an elastic load balancer for TCP port 22 with a health check on a web service that spawns a process as each of the user accounts before returning "good", combined with an auto-scaling group to make certain there are always a couple healthy instances, would be an automated way to keep something like this running through fork bombs.

people were having fun with forkbombs a bit ago.

Presumably we're on the synflood stage now.

Doesn't work for me as well. I managed to login an do one ls, but since then it's dead.

Can someone share the source and program of the first level so we can have a look?

Maybe they should just publish a VM image.

Not a bad idea, but how do you keep people from peeking at the passwords with root access on their own VM?

They are asking for code or a brief description of how you proceeded through the steps. If you're going to take the time to document the process (correctly) then it shouldn't matter that you have the root password. Presumably you'd get stuck at some point where you couldn't explain how you achieved the subsequent step.

How do you keep yourself from rifling through the deck to find the Aces when you play solitaire?

Yeah, my connection froze, and now I cannot connect, ssh or http...