[CentOS] LDAP server, too many open files

Thu Oct 22 16:23:28 UTC 2009
Benjamin Franz <jfranz at freerun.com>

Jacob Bresciani wrote:
> I've setup an LDAP server with a slave server on Centos 5.3 X86_64,  
> replication works, most of the time client logins work fine but I'm  
> starting to get a error I can't seem to eliminate, it's starting to  
> cause login failures for users and I think it's causing other  
> application failures when they try to auth against ldap.
>
> on the client side /var/log/messages shows
[...]
>
> on the server side I see
>   Oct 22 08:53:23 ldap1slapd[23963]: warning: cannot open /etc/ 
> hosts.allow: Too many open files
> Oct 22 08:53:23 ldap1slapd[23963]: warning: cannot open /etc/ 

You probably are running into the default limit for open files. Look at 
/etc/security/limits.conf and add a line reading

*                -       nofile          64000

Then restart the ldap server via the init script.

-- 
Benjamin Franz