[olug] Ulimit defaults

[Nick Walter]

I'm trying to configure a RH 2.1 AS server for a database application. 
Since this is going to be a very large database I'm running into
problems with the ulimit default for number of open files allowed in a
single session.  

As the database user, I can type ulimit -Hn and ulimit -Sn and find out
I have a 1024 open file limit.  That is way too small for my needs.  I'm
having a devil of a time figuring out a way to permanently raise that
limit.  I can manually set higher limits as root user and then su to the
database user and have higher limits, but that doesn't work long term as
this database software needs to start automatically at boot without
human intervention.  

I've tried mucking with /etc/security/limits.conf and that doesn't seem
to have any effect at all.  Anyone know of a config file or perhaps init
script modification I can make to set some very high hard and soft
ulimit numbers for one specific user?

Nick Walter