Andrei, thanks for your response
> I've seen this before, and it has got something to do with too many > processes running on the system, eating up the file descriptor table. We > had a system in the office that had 50-some instances of a process > running, and were getting this message (I believe). Please correct me if > I'm wrong. In theory there are only the processes running that do allways run. And i have some simulations runnig within X and a gnome-session, could be that i forgot to logout from one-or-two VTs but this was never before a problem. I used to be able to login from home and have a look at the data. May be you are right but i would be supprised if it was already too much for the kernel. On the other hand, i have already had a funny problem lately when i did an 'apt-get update': it failed and complained that there are too many files open. The problem was there for one day and then 'disappeared' again. Do you think the two things could be related and are signs of the instability of my system? imre