[TriLUG] nodes, zero byte files

[Scott Chilcote via TriLUG]

On 10/26/2015 10:51 AM, James Jones via TriLUG wrote:
> Being one of the senior citizens of Trilug and a late bloomer in computer
> programming and usage, I have many things to learn about Linux.
>
> Recently I had an intrusion in a virtual machine that resulted in
> "exceeding the node limit"
>

Hi James,

You mention that someone intruded into your VM and caused this problem
to occur.  That's rather interesting. I'd be very curious what they had
done to use up all of the filesystem's inodes. 

Inodes are consumed by files, and having a whole bunch of small or zero
byte files would be the typical cause.  You can search for these using
find, e.g. "find . -size 0" and "find . -size -1k".  You'd have the
option of cleaning up the files to free the inodes, but as you said it's
much safer to wipe it clean and start over.

Perhaps your intruder was attempting to use your drive space as a file
server of some kind?

   Scott C.

-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA