🚀 go-pugleaf

Our Decstation 5000/200 has been running pretty well under ULTRIX 4.4, 
but yesterday, I started noticing some odd problems involving flock and 
too many open files.  In the first place, I found about 500 megs of log 
files, generated over a period of about four days, containing 99% a 
message to the extent of: "named can't function because of too many open 
files; connection refused".  I trimmed down the logs, rebooted, and 
thought everything would be okay.  (As if...)

But last evening, e-mail stopped working.  Both mail and newaliases failed on
accout of "flock error: too many open files".  I also saw we had about 10-15
sendmail  processes running then, each processing something in 
/usr/spool/mailqueue.  A reboot seemed to fix the problem, but from the 
rate at which new sendmail processes keep popping up, I'm not doubting it 
won't happen again unless I keep rebooting every day or two -- not a very 
idea solution.

The man pages for all this stuff don't seem terribly enlightening, and I 
don't really have any idea where to begin getting a stable system back.
Anyone have any ideas what might cause a sudden problem with flock, 
seemingly out of the blue?  What other info would be helpful?

Thanks.

-Chris