Kerberos and file descriptors > 1024 ????

[Ken Raeburn]

(First, in the future, please configure your mail program to send plain 
text, no html, no base-64 encoding, when you send to the Kerberos list. 
  Mixing in html and encoding with base-64 are common tricks for 
spammers, and unfortunately our mailing list moderation software is a 
little behind the times, meaning I have to do a bunch of manual work to 
figure out if your message is spam or not.)

On Wednesday, Mar 17, 2004, at 20:38 US/Eastern, skyhawk wrote:
> We use kerberos system on redhat Linux 9.0 ...
>
> But kernel file descriptors parameter is only 1024...

There are generally two sets of limits, "soft" limits which you can 
raise, and "hard" limits which you cannot.  For example, some people 
will limit "coredumpsize" to 0, and then raise it back up again if they 
want some crashing program to generate a core file for later 
examination.  The limits you were examining are almost certainly the 
soft limits.  Try using the limit or ulimit command (depending on what 
shell you use -- it's built in) to raise the number of file descriptors.

I'm pretty sure we're not going out of our way to reduce the soft (or 
hard) limit on file descriptors.  The 1024 value is probably inherited 
from whatever the system sets at startup time, which ought to be good 
enough for nearly all user programs.

> Our system needs file descriptors > 16000     -_-

Wow.  I really hope that's just for one or two special daemon processes 
that you might restart while logged in remotely, and not for user 
programs in general....

Ken