Tag: Ubuntu

Why I prefer Ubuntu

Yet another draft post that I found recently.  Yes, I’m still a fan of Ubuntu.

As many of my colleagues know, I’m a huge Debian fan. I love the stability and ease of package management. The primary thing I don’t like about Debian is it’s lack of a release schedule. Their attitude is, “We’ll release it when it’s ready.”

I don’t disagree with that attitude, Debian is a very impressive community-driven development project. If I was programming for such a project, I’d probably prefer the “release it when it’s ready” method.
Enter Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on Debian, which means it shares its ease of package management. Ubuntu also has a release schedule. They plan to release a new version every 6 months, supporting it for 18 months (security patches, fixes for critical bugs that could cause data loss, and extra translations.) They also plan to have an Enterprise Release every 12 to 24 months (which will receive additional testing.) These Enterprise are supported for a longer period of time. The current LTS version is supported until 2015.

“Too many open files” error on Ubuntu

So, you’ve run into a “Too many open files” error (why else would you be here?)
I ran into it on some Ubuntu Hardy systems where Tomcat was running and Java had been allocated a ton of memory (thus giving it plenty of space to run out of control.)

It’s a simple fix.
Add increased limits to /etc/security/limits.conf. Here’s what I added to fix my problem:

* soft nofile 16384
* hard nofile 16384

… then edit /etc/pam.d/common-session and add:

session required pam_limits.so

to the bottom of the file. Users will have to re-login to see the new limits.