Came home Tuesday from a 13hr day to find the system locked up. Hit the reset switch,
let fsck check the drives, found a lot of orphaned inodes. Looking at my
syslog I see the following:

May 17 19:48:29 cpollock fetchmail[5229]: 1 message for cpollock at
pop.earthlink.net (3339 octets).
May 17 19:48:29 cpollock kernel: VFS: file-max limit 25241 reached
May 17 19:48:29 cpollock last message repeated 7 times
May 17 19:48:29 cpollock fetchmail[5229]: reading message
cpollock@pop.earthlink.net:1 of 1 (3339 octets)
May 17 19:48:29 cpollock kernel: VFS: file-max limit 25241 reached
May 17 19:48:29 cpollock last message repeated 2 times
May 18 00:48:29 cpollock fetchmail[5229]: MDA open failed
May 18 00:48:29 cpollock fetchmail[5229]: MDA error while fetching from
pop.earthlink.net

A little more background. Last night I tried for hours to send a 107k pdf
file to my boss. It got to about 60% and this window popped up in Kmail:

Could not write to file smtpauth.earthlink.net

The rest was the usual, nothing else will be sent until this file is sent or
removed. I tested various file sizes until I found that only a 14k file
would go out. So, now for my questions:

1) What would cause these 25241 files?
2) How to prevent this from happening in the future?

Thanks
Chris

Note, I'm running Mandriva 10.1 Official

Well, I spent a little quality time with google, and it sounds like some proccess has alot of files open.
You may want to see if you can figure out which one it is, see if you can fix it...
But, here's a band-aid you might use:

(as root)
# echo *value* > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

Where value is the number of files to be openable at once. I don't know the upper bounds, but my machine has it set at 50918.

EDIT:
If you find a value that works for you; you can make it permanent by adding the echo to /etc/rc.d/rc.local
or
add a line to etc/sysctl.conf...
file-max = *value*