[H-GEN] Out of disk space errors?

[Stephen Thorne]

On 15/05/05, David Harrison <trogspam at games.telstra.com> wrote:
> I recently ran into a problem on one of our Linux boxes - something had
> filled up one of the partitions, and df was reporting 0 bytes available.
> I freed up a stack of disk space, but no matter how much I freed up,
> there was still only zero bytes available - despite the fact that the
> 'used blocks' column was signifcantly less than before and continuing to
> drop the more I deleted.
> 
> As of yesterday, another box has started doing the exact same thing. One
> is running 2.4.23 and the other 2.4.24 kernel.
> 
> Has anyone seen this behaviour before? Short of a reboot (which I'm
> trying to avoid at all costs) I'm running out of things to try to fix
> it. I found a couple other people with similar problems on Google but
> only vague references that indicated it might be an issue with older
> kernels.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions,

some process writing to an open file is one possible reason, as
pointed out by another poster, but the most obvious answer to me is,
most linux filesystems are configured to reserve 5% of system disk
space for usage by root, so a user will be unable to create
files/append to files, while UID 0 can still do so.

On modern computer systems, 5% is a fair bit. i.e. on a 160gig drive
5% is 8 gigabytes. More than adequate for root to be storing 7 debian
CDs, a gig of mp3s, and a 2 gigabyte logfile, while having
450megabytes to move in ;)
-- 
Stephen Thorne
Development Engineer