[Dovecot] Dovecot too many open files???

[Tim Tyler]

Dovecot experts,
  We just recently deployed Dovecot 1.0.rc15 on a Redhat 5 system.  I 
have over 1400 users.  At first it appeared to work fine.  But soon, 
we had complaints of students that couldn't retrieve their email.  I 
looked in the logs and found this error.

Jan  7 22:27:31 stu dovecot: auth(default): 
pam(pucklisl,<http://144.89.40.6>144.89.40.6): pipe() failed: Too 
many open files

We are running Dovecot to authenticate via pam which authenticates ldap.

Below is the output of
[root at stu ~]# dovecot -n
# /etc/dovecot.conf
listen: *
ssl_cert_file: /etc/mail/certs/server.pem
ssl_key_file: /etc/mail/certs/server.key
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login
login_process_size: 512
login_max_processes_count: 32
mail_location: mbox:%h/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
mail_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(pop3): /etc/custom-pop3.sh
mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3
auth default:
   passdb:
     driver: pam
   userdb:
     driver: passwd


Any solutions for this problem?


Tim Tyler
Network Engineer - Beloit College
tyler at beloit.edu