Patrick wrote:
> Thanks for the information. I was thinking about the login you
> mentioned. The primary application I need this for is Asterisk. Like
> apache it is started as root and by passing -U <user> -G <group>
> parameters it will run as that <user>/<group> (asterisk/asterisk in my
> case). Do I still need to add the info to the initscript or do I add it
> to limits.conf?
I run a large scale Asterisk system on Fedora Core 3. I had a problem
where the default number of file descriptors wasn't adequate for the
number of socket connections that were being opened. Suffice it to say
that I learned the information I'm passing on about ulimit and
limits.conf the hard way. I make all ulimit changes in the init script
AND limits.conf. That way they're applied in both of the following
scenarios:
1) Asterisk is started automatically at boot.
2) Asterisk is started manually from a login prompt after a crash or
maintenance downtime.
If you're planning on having a large number of concurrent calls, you
should increase the maximum number of file descriptors so that you don't
run into the same problem I did. This can be done by adding the
following lines to limits.conf:
<user> soft nofile 65536
<user> hard nofile 65536
And adding the following line to Asterisk's init script, prior to
starting Asterisk itself:
ulimit -n 65536
If security isn't a major issue, I'd recommend running Asterisk as
root. There is a substantial amount of work involved in setting all of
the permissions to run it properly as another user.
Here are a couple of scripts that you can use for starting Asterisk at
boot and restarting it automatically if it crashes:
<http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.2/contrib/init.d/rc.redhat.asterisk?rev=15615&view=markup>
<http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.2/contrib/scripts/safe_asterisk?rev=21638&view=markup>
I'd be happy to continue helping you with your system, but we're getting
a little off topic. I'm also an active member of the Asterisk users
list <http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users>, so I'll
keep an eye out for your posts over there. Feel free to contact me off
list as well.
Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer
