Probably a silly question, but I'm over my head and sinking fast.

I've installed Mandrake 10.1 Free edition on my PC and I'm trying to set a larger amount of open file handles.

It's defaulted to 1024, but this is not enough for me, I'm greedy.

I had some advice so I set a line in my limits.conf

* hard nofile 4096

but this seems to have had no effect. Is there something that I'm missing?

I also tried logging in and typing

ulimit -n 4096

this seems to work for that console session, but not for the whole system. My machine boots straight into KDE and auto logs in if that makes a difference.

I've looked in the pam.d folder and there are many files there, but most seem to refer to

session required pam_stack.so service=system-auth

and in system-auth is the following line

session required pam_limits.so

Help please?

I don't know anything about this, but I had one thought. Have you tried adding ulimit -n 4096 to a startup script? That may do it.
I'm not sure where they would be in Mandrake, though. I've never used it.

If you want to use ulimit -n, you'll have to add it to /etc/profile, or change the existing entry there.

All hail the amazing.

Thanks to DrJ for the Solution and thanks to OpJose for explaining where to put it, all is now much better in the land of my Mandrake.

I'm sure there should be a setting I can change somewhere to make it default, but as this works fine, I'm not going to argue.

Once again, thanks folks.

/etc/profile makes it the default for any "session" so this encompasses anything which runs as a seperate process, user, login, job, etc.