On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Ed Hynan <eh_l...@optonline.net> wrote:
> Saturday morning, saw this in /var/log/messages: > > "Aug 2 08:29:12 lucy su: default: setting resource limit openfiles: > Invalid argument" > That indicates that the requested -cur value was greater than the requested -max value, if any, or the current -max value if no change to the max was requested. > That's from /etc/weekly, which uses 'su -m nobody' for locate db update > on line 52. The log message can be produced by hand with, e.g.: > > # echo /bin/echo FOO | SHELL=/bin/sh nice -5 su -m nobody > > invoked by root. > Hmm, I'm unable to reproduce that on my 5.6 system. Compare the output of ulimit -nH and the openfiles-cur value in the login.conf. On my system, the normal hard (i.e., -max) limit is 1024; is that not the case on yours? If so, where is the smaller value coming from? The root .profile? Some other system config file? Inherited from a lower limit on your personal account when you su'ed to root? > BTW, I jumped from 4.9 to 5.5 so the 4.9 login.conf is the most > recent I have handy. The 4.9 login.conf likewise has only > openfiles-cur in default:, but I don't think I've seen that log > message before. Some verbosity recently added? > The setrlimit() syscall was changed to comply with POSIX and return an error instead of (iirc) silently clamping the soft limit to the hard limit. Philip Guenther
