[Beowulf] strange ulimit+ssh problem: ulimit unlimited only works in certain cases

[Rahul Nabar]

I am trying to get my "ulimit -l" set to unlimited, for normal users,
and not sure what's going wrong. I get the correct ulimit under only
once particular scenario: If I become root and then su to a normal
user. Otherwise it doesn't seem to work. The symptoms are:

rpnabar at eu001>ssh eu002 ulimit -l
32

[rpnabar at eu001 root]$ ssh eu002
[rpnabar at eu002 ~]$ ulimit -l
32

[root at eu001 ~]# ulimit -l
unlimited
[root at eu001 ~]# su rpnabar
[rpnabar at eu001 root]$ ulimit -l
unlimited

eu001 and eu002 are identical compute nodes running CentOS.

Here's what all I've already tried:

[rpnabar at eu001 root] cat /etc/security/limits.conf
[snip]
*               hard    memlock         unlimited
*               soft    memlock         unlimited
# End of file

[rpnabar at eu001 root]$ cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config
[snip]
UsePrivilegeSeparation no
[snip]
[rpnabar at eu001 root]$ service sshd restart

The last suggestion was on the basis of a RHEL knowledgebase article.
Any other things that I can check for this? I'm stumped.

-- 
Rahul