[K12OSN] OT: Openldap and too many open files

Terrell Prude' Jr. microman at cmosnetworks.com
Fri Sep 5 15:17:04 UTC 2008


On Friday 05 September 2008 10:07, David Hopkins wrote:
> My ldap server is now failing with the
>
> slapd[17057]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.deny: Too many open files
>
> message.   I have 100+ teachers and an additional 150+ students
> connecting at any given time.  I run nscd on all my systems since this
> is a suggested solution for reducing the load and consequently the
> open files on the ldap server(s).
>
> I can restart ldap and it will run for a bit before issuing this
> warning at which point all authentication stops.  I've googled for
> solutions and most suggest using ulimit in the ldap script to set the
> file limit higher.  I have done so but it doesn't seem to make the
> change. Other responses on this suggest that I may have to recompile
> openldap and possibly nss related items as well to get around the
> issue. That is a daunting issue.
>
> I have also seen a suggestion to set the idletimeout in slapd.conf but
> I am not sure that this wouldn't adversely affect anything since it
> closes connections.
>
> Has anyone else seen this issue and implemented a solution?
>
> Sincerely,
> Dave Hopkins
>
>
> Has anyone else seen this issue and found a good solution to it?

Ahhh...that's an error I haven't seen in a long while.  It sounds like you're 
running out of file descriptors.  Try setting the fs.file-max parameter to 
something a bit bigger than it is now.

BTW, I got this from about 5 minutes of Googling.  It is your friend.  :-)

  
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Fix+'Too+many+open+files'+error+on+Linux+by+increasing+filehandles

--TP




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