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I use ubuntu server 10.04 on a fairly good machine, with 2.40 dual-core processor and 2GB RAM.

My users login with ssh or samba. I have setup LDAP with PAM to sync user accounts between unix and samba. When I allowed about 90 users to login over ssh at once the server refused login for many users. I am using dropbear as ssh server. Even samba logins failed for many users. I need to allow at least 100 users to login at once. Is there anyway to do this?

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Out of curiosity, why did you choose a non default ssh server ? Also please add the specific error message that you get when an user attempts to login. –  João Pinto Feb 4 '11 at 15:58
Did you check both the sshd,samba and pam related logs for more details ? –  João Pinto Feb 4 '11 at 16:04
Open ssh server has strict limits as to the number of users allowed to login at one time. I tried increasing the number to 50, the open ssh daemon didn't load at reboot. So I removed it and installed dropbear, and it did work well when there were about 40 users online at once. Eeven samba worked fine when there were around 50 users online. But recently the number of users increased, and I faced the above mentioned issue. –  nixnotwin Feb 4 '11 at 17:29
It's students learning bash programming over ssh, and stroing their documents and files from Windows machines on the "same" samba server. –  nixnotwin Feb 6 '11 at 13:28
What number did you try to increase to 50? I see nothing in 'man sshd_config' or 'man sshd' that suggests there is a limit of any kind imposed by openssh-server. –  SpamapS Mar 21 '11 at 20:27

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

I think what you're looking for is in the man sshd_config, the MaxSessions and MaxStartups fields


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