Ubuntu – Increasing the maximum number of open files

Recently a co-worker and I were stress testing an application in a Ubuntu Linux virtual machine when we ran into the open file limit which is 1024 files. Initially we tried to use the command ulimit to solve this problem, however every time we tried to increase the open file limit it would still end up being 1024. Then we realized that in order for a user to use ulimit to increase the open file limit, the limits needed to first be increased in the limits.conf file. Here is what solved the problem for us:

• Open the file in a text editor: sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf
• Add two lines to increase the soft limit and hard limit for the user “myuser” before the #end tag
  • myuser hard nofile 1800
  • myuser soft nofile 1600
• You will need to reboot to make this change take effect

Now you should have a good sized file limit!

Prairie Dev Con 2010!

Chris from P2 Presenting at PRDC10

This last week I had the great opportunity to attend Prairie Dev Con 2010 in Regina. This is the first time a good sized software conference has been organized here in the prairies. I travelled to Regina with some co-workers and really enjoyed the experience. I was extremely impressed at how well organized the conference was, as well as the number of talks lined up (50 talks over 2 days).

Since this was the first time a big software conference had been hosted in Saskatchewan, the organizer, who works primarily with Microsoft technologies, used many of his contacts from within that community to put together a good list of speakers. Now that the conference has been run once and had a good attendance, the hope is for next years conference that we can attract speakers on a more wide range of technologies such as as Python, Django, Scala, and document style databases such as MongoDB.

Since Point2 has been doing a lot of interesting work with new technologies, I hope for next year we will be able to put on a number of talks to offer a more well rounded list of topics for next year.

Overall, I was really impressed with PRDC10 and I am looking forward to seeing it happen again next year!

Remote Desktop to Windows XP from Ubuntu

This weekend I decided to reformat my laptop with the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix. So far I have been very happy with the switch, it is a great distro! Now, I still need to be able to remote into my computer at work which is Windows XP Pro. Fortunately there is a great free tool called rdesktop that does the trick.

To install rdesktop just run the following command:

        sudo aptitude install rdesktop

To start a remote desktop session:

        /usr/bin/rdesktop -f myworkmachine.company.com

Note: the -f option opens the remote desktop session in full screen mode.

To exit full screen mode:

        Ctrl+Alt+Enter