socket: too many open file descriptors

[Chris Buxton]

On Nov 19, 2008, at 5:03 AM, pollex wrote:

> The version of bind is "BIND 9.3.4-P1.1"
> And the error appears when named open around of 1000 sockets:
> lsof | grep named | wc -l
> 968
>
> If I have to reinstall bind, there are any way to do it via apt-get?
> Or the only way is compiling the binaries?
> Thanks again

I recently had a customer on Ubuntu with a BIND version "9.4.1-P1.1",  
which contained some form of the source port randomization fix. Debian  
and/or Ubuntu is, as is often the case, playing fast and loose with  
the BIND version numbers, applying newer patches to older versions so  
that they can maintain a reference version number.

The problem for that customer was that named kept dumping core. We  
fixed it by simply compiling from the stock ISC source code, setting  
configure options to match the filesystem layout that Ubuntu uses.  
That brought them up to 9.4.2-P2.

I relate this anecdote to show that, no, there is no way to upgrade  
named to the standard ISC version without compiling it from stock  
source code. You might be able to look in the Ubuntu sources package  
to find what configure options they're passing, but that's about it.

Chris Buxton
Professional Services
Men & Mice