*BSD News Article 74645


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From: ccteakle@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (Chris Teakle)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: named 4.9.4 - "Too many open files"
Date: 25 Jul 1996 11:39:37 GMT
Organization: University of Queensland
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ccteakle@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (Chris Teakle) writes:

>One of our nameservers (bind-4.9.4, FreeBSD-2.1.0) recently had an attack
>of very bad behaviour. It started denying existence of hosts in certain
>domains for which it is a secondary, which led to problems such as the
>bouncing of correctly-addressed email.

>...

>    Jul 23 06:10:28 krefti named[64]: cltr.zone.bak: Too many open files
>    Jul 23 06:10:28 krefti named[64]: cltr.edu.zone.bak: Too many open files

Thanks to

  John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
  Mark.Andrews@dms.CSIRO.AU
  Jim Davis <jdavis@cs.arizona.edu>

who emailed me pointing out that named was probably hitting the per-process
limit on number of open file descriptors.

The default limit (64) can be lifted by running "limit descriptors 256" or
"ulimit -n 256" before starting named.
I opted to build a new kernel with a higher default, using:

options         "OPEN_MAX=256"

----
Chris Teakle
Prentice Centre, University of Qld, Australia