Filesystem full ?!?

[Benjamin Scott]

On Jul 1 at 8:53pm, Drew Van Zandt wrote:
> In fact I did run fsck, which removed the needs_recovery flag ...

   I seem to have missed a message here (perhaps an off-list reply)... in any 
event, did you run "fsck" or "fsck -f"?  The latter forces a full filesystem 
check.  If you're seeing funky behavior in a filesystem, running a full check 
is often a good idea.  Be warned that it can take quite some time, especially 
on a large filesystem with lots of large files.

   The "needs_recovery" flag indicates that there are transactions in the 
journal which need to be replayed to get the filesystem into a consistent 
state.  When the filesystem is mounted or fsck'ed, the system looks at that 
flag to know if it needs to process the journal.  Its presence generally 
indicates the filesystem is either currently mounted, or was not unmounted 
cleanly.  Running a simple "fsck" will do so, but will not run any further 
checks unless it sees a need to.  Hence the need for the "-f" switch.

   If a full fsck doesn't fine any problems, give a yell.

> In other news, df -i shows 61445 inodes free on that filesystem, which 
> really ought to be plenty.  :-)

   While that certainly would indicate enough free inodes currently, I do think 
it is worth noting that the number of inodes on that filesystem may not be 
sufficient over time.  A total of 118784 inodes on a 500 GB filesystem means 
your average file size needs to be around 4 megabytes *or larger* or you will 
run into inode scarcity problems.  Keep in mind that directories and symlinks 
also use inodes.  If you're keeping, say, MP3's or CD images, you should be 
fine, but smaller files (like the *contents* of software distribution CDs) may 
lead to trouble.

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>