Hi!

I got a few "Postmaster notify" from Sendmail, telling me there was
"mail.local: /var/mail/many: Too many open files in system" and also
a few with "mail: can't load library 'libc.so.39.0'".

/var/log/messages told me:
Aug 27 16:00:01 blowfish /bsd: file: table is full
Aug 27 16:00:01 blowfish last message repeated 19 times
Aug 27 16:02:11 blowfish last message repeated 4 times
Aug 27 16:07:14 blowfish last message repeated 128 times

So, I made some googling, and found a few similar cases, and someone
suggested
changing the kern.maxfiles. I did "sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=10000" to
increase
the value from 1772 to 10000, and put the same value in /etc/sysctl.conf

This is a GENERIC 3.9 install, on an i386 P4 1GB ram machine, running
Sendmail,
Apache, MySQL, Samba. I have a few scripts in crontab collecting
SNMP data
from my router to MRTG, besides that this is a low traffic server,
with few users
and a few websites.

I think 1772 files seems to be too low as default. Is it?
And is 10000 a too high value?


Mackan