samba - Aug 2003 - "Too many open files" error

We have a Sun E450 running Solaris 8 and Samba 2.2.8a as our domain controller.
We have had no problems with Samba until earlier this week when we have started
to get lots of these errors in log.smbd:

[2003/08/08 16:29:14, 0] lib/debug.c:(348)
  Unable to open new log file /home/samba_pearl/var/log.smbd: Too many open file
s

This has been happening once a day, at the same time some users are not able to
print from their PCs (the machine also controls printing via Samba and Cups).

Any idea what could be going wrong?

Michael
-- 
Michael Keightley <Michael.Keightley@quadstone.com>    Tel: +44 131 240
3137
Systems Manager, Quadstone Limited,                    Fax: +44 131 220 4492
16 Chester Street, Edinburgh EH3 7RA, Scotland         http://www.quadstone.com

Are you running anything new on the box that you weren't running before
this week? There may be a process leaking file descriptors. Last week I tried
a program from the FreeBSD ports collection (Privoxy) and found out it was
making calls to the non-thread-safe gethostbyname() and leaking one file
descriptor each time it resolved a hostname, quickly exhausting my kernel's
open file limit.

I have absolutely no idea how Solaris works, but on FreeBSD you can check
the open file limit and the currently open file count as follows respectively:

sysctl kern.maxfiles
sysctl kern.openfiles

Killing the offending process immediately freed up the leaked descriptors.

Cheers,

Nicolas Gieczewski
Nix Software Solutions
http://www.nixsoftware.com/


"Michael Keightley" <Michael.Keightley@quadstone.com> wrote in
message news:20030808154001.GA4186@quadstone.com...
> 
> We have a Sun E450 running Solaris 8 and Samba 2.2.8a as our domain
controller.
> We have had no problems with Samba until earlier this week when we have
started
> to get lots of these errors in log.smbd:
> 
> [2003/08/08 16:29:14, 0] lib/debug.c:(348)
>   Unable to open new log file /home/samba_pearl/var/log.smbd: Too many open
file s
> 
> This has been happening once a day, at the same time some users are not
able to
> print from their PCs (the machine also controls printing via Samba and
Cups).
> 
> Any idea what could be going wrong?
> 
> Michael
> -- 
> Michael Keightley <Michael.Keightley@quadstone.com>    Tel: +44 131
240 3137
> Systems Manager, Quadstone Limited,                    Fax: +44 131 220
4492
> 16 Chester Street, Edinburgh EH3 7RA, Scotland        
http://www.quadstone.com
> -- 
> To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
> instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba