"Too many open files" (Critical, have only one session left)

[Joachim Dagerot]

I have got it before and took appropriate steps using the ideas and tips from you guys. Now I have it again:

Current situation on my head-less system is that I do have a single SSH session up. Unfortunately it's not authenticated as ROOT but as an ordinary user.

When I try a "ls" I get :

$ ls
ls: .: Too many open files in system

Trying a su gives:
$ su
/usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Cannot open "/usr/lib/libutil.so.3"


I have a fairly huge RAID-5 system thatdislikes a power shutdown so I rather want to reboot the machine manually. I certainly need som help here and also more help on how to avoid this problem in the future.