UC Davis Cyrus Incident September 2007

[Pascal Gienger]

Scott Adkins <adkinss at ohio.edu> wrote:

> Meanwhile, we hacked around this in a very cool way.  We copied the imapd
> process 60 times (assuming average of 12,000 processes, shooting for 200
> processes per executable, that is 60 individual executables).  These were
> named /usr/cyrus/bin/imapd_001 through /usr/cyrus/bin/imapd_060.  We then
> symlinked the "imapd" binary to imapd_001.  We then wrote a cron job that
> ran once a minute and relinked the imapd symlink to the next numbered
> executable,

And how did you solve the problem of the "deadlock" resulting in deleteing 
the symbolic link, setting the new one? Between these events an exec of 
imapd would break resulting in an error to the customer.

Funny hack though.