Reply To: Unable to bind tcp/ip socket: Address already in use

[Steve Carter]

The ‘too many open files’ error is related to the max number of open file handles that the ‘hci’ user can have at any one time.  This is defined in the nofiles(descriptors) (run ‘ulimit -a’ from the cmd prompt).  Each time a thread attempts to establish a connection and fails, it uses a file handle.  Unfortunately, the file handles are not released again until the process is stopped and restarted.  Once you run out of file handles…..’too many open files’.

If you have ‘lsof’, try the following:

/usr/sbin/lsof | grep portNumber

If the port is still being used by another process, it will return something like this:

hciengine  749744      hci   24u  IPv4  0xf10000f30506db58                0t0    TCP hostName:44688->172.24.201.192:61296 (ESTABL

ISHED)

You can then grep on the pid (749744) to determine what is using your port number.  Most of the time it is another CL process.  Other times it may be the monitor daemon or lock manager.

Let me know what you find out.  I’d be interested in knowing.

Steve

Mary Kobis wrote:

Thanks Steve…

Sorry I forgot to add… we are on AIX 5.2/CL5.3.2. What is baffling me is that this port has been working for 5+ years, and this morning at 4:43 it had an error, that said “too many files”. I stopped and restarted the engine and now I get the current error message – Unable to bind tcp/ip socket: Address already in use…