su: cannot set user id: Resource temporarily unavailable

[Brian Chabot]

I'm trying to su to a user on a CentOS 6.4 x86_64 box and get the
error in the subject:

[user1 at cent6.4box ~]$ sudo su - user2
su: cannot set user id: Resource temporarily unavailable
[user1 at cent6.4box ~]$

The limits.conf file has the following entries:
*                                         soft   nofile          100000
*                                         hard   nofile          100000
*                                         soft   nproc           8192
*                                         hard   nproc           32767

The current usage for pengine is:
[user1 at cent6.4box ~]$ ps -eLF | grep user2 | wc -l
1108
[user1 at cent6.4box ~]$ lsof | grep user2  | wc -l
1558
[user1 at cent6.4box ~]$

While these are the majority of the processes and files in use on the
system, they are nowhere near the limits.

I even increased the limits 10-fold and that has not worked.

I'm kind of lost here.  Usually the error indicates files or processes
over the limit but here... not so much.

Any ideas?



Brian Chabot