Running across some curious stuff with ulimit on CentOS 5.10.
We have a non CentOS packaged version of Asterisk (using their packages) that we start at boot time with a typical RC script.
Recently it started whining that it couldn't open enough file handles.
As we dug further into this, it appears that at boot time, it inherits ulimit from init, which is pretty low: 1024.
We've set /etc/security/limits.conf and sysctl significantly higher both for root/system wide and also for the user Asterisk runs under, to no avail.
If we log in via ssh as root (or sudo) the correct root/system-wide ulimit of 8192 is set.
Looking in /proc/[PID]/limits shows the lower ulimit only if the package is started from init (standard rc3.d type sysV stuff...). If we restart it via console, remote ssh, anything else, the limit bumps to 8196.
Attempting to force the ulimit up inside the RC script has no effect, since the package is running as a non-root user. It fails to raise the limit.
Right now, we're not totally against just taking it out of the startup and starting it manually anyway, since we really don't want the Asterisk platform coming up after a crash/reboot anyway, and any other reboots there will always be a human involved, but the way init is handling ulimit seems utterly retarded and broken.
Some indication (different engineer found it, I haven't seen the RHEL case number) appears to indicate that folks wanted init ulimited heavily in case of startup DDoS type stuff, but we haven't figured out a semi-sane unix-conventional type way AROUND this when it's needed that if we were hit by the proverbial bus, a "normal" unix guy would find.
Perhaps we're missing something.
Thoughts?
--
Nate Duehr
denverpilot@xxxxxx
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