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"Too many files open on system"

Dan Brown

"Too many files open on system"
« on: October 22, 2001, 06:57:27 AM »
I've been running into some strange problems with my SME v5 server recently.  I've installed Update 2 and RAV, and I'm thinking the problem has something to do with RAV.

I'm now getting problems in the shell.  Errors like "Too many files open on system" or "basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot load shared object file: Error 23".  The reason I think RAV has something to do with this is that if I do "ps aux | grep rav", I get about 300 listings.  Most of them are "sh /usr/local/rav8/bin/ravupdate.sh", "/bin/sh -c /usr/local/rav8/bin/ravupdate.sh > /dev/null 2>&1" (which is from the cron entry, IIRC), or "/usr/local/rav8/bin/ravav --update engine --host ftp.us.ravantivirus."

Any ideas what's going on, and/or how to stop it?  I'm sure rebooting would take care of this for now, but this isn't a Windows box, and I shouldn't need to reboot for things like this.  Besides, rebooting isn't likely to actually _fix_ anything.  Thanks for any info!

guestFF

Re: "Too many files open on system"
« Reply #1 on: October 22, 2001, 12:56:14 PM »
Hi Dan,

Just some thoughts, are the ftp sites pingable?
Is there a faulty 'ravupdate.sh'
How does the ravupdate.sh supposed to finish his job?
Do you get RAV mail saying anything about the update job?

Regards,

RequestedDeletion

Scott Smith

Re: "Too many files open on system"
« Reply #2 on: October 22, 2001, 03:40:04 PM »
Dan

I've seen this exact thing back on the 4.0 betas -- without RAV. My problem then was that qmail was not configured correctly (specifically, it was running but all the setup info was incorrect.) A cron task that I added added proceeded to send a nightly email which was a couple of MB. After several days of this (one new message nightly, bounces, etc.) the server fell over with the console messages you describe. After searching about on a very lamed up server, I found that there were thousands of files in the qmail queue, and lots of qmail tasks spawned. Cleaned up the server and rebooted, and it happened again a few days later.

Once I fixed the mail setup info (and modified my cron task to not fire of the message if email is not working!) the problem has never happened again.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Darrell May

Re: "Too many files open on system"
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2001, 02:55:56 AM »
Dan Brown wrote:
> this is that if I do "ps aux | grep rav", I get about 300
> listings.

Sounds like you may have something incorrectly configured Dan.  Only [ravmd] should appear in "ps aux | grep rav".  Check the cron log for errors.

tail -100 /var/log/cron

Also run the ravupdate.sh command manually to see the output and if any errors are reported.

/usr/local/rav8/bin/ravupdate.sh

Regards,

Darrell