'Too many open files' and the Sobig virus

[Ed Ortiz]

Adrian, I had the same problem on a Solaris 2.6 system running MS 4.10-1.  I updated the following line in mailscanner.conf from:

 Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 100
 Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 100

to

 Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 30
 Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 30


I don't have a huge amount of email going through my system on a regular basis so these numbers work for me.  I stopped and restarted the Mailscanner process after I made the changes.


Hope this helps.

Edward Ortiz


>>> A.Barker at UCL.AC.UK 8/20/03 2:33:58 AM >>>
We are still seeing the 'Too many open files' problem even after
increasing the rlim_fd_max and rlim_fd_cur in /etc/system and rebooting,
and ulimit -n unlimited to the 'check_mailscanner' script. The problem
seems to occur with the Sobig virus, although since most of the
messages that we have queued are the virus, this may not be the
cause. Has anyone else seen this problem ? We are unable to process
incoming external email and are stuck. This is on a Solaris 8 system,
MailScanner 4.20-3.






Adrian Barker, Information Systems
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
External phone: (+44) 020 7679  2795,  Fax (+44) 20 7388 5406
Internal phone: x 32795
Email: A.Barker at ucl.ac.uk