[TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

Exim4 seems to be a mail transfer agent (MTA).  What do you use for your mail program on your Linux box?  Postfix, sendmail, etc.




> On Sep 28, 2017, at 10:01 AM, Thomas Delrue <delrue.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, September 28, 2017 9:53:40 AM EDT Ron Kelley wrote:
>> For what it’s worth, the root partition “/" has allocated 735000 inodes, and
>> you have used them all.  This means you have a TON of files (presumably very
>> small ones) in that partition - regardless of partition size.  Another way
>> to think about it; you have used 3.9GB of data (file size) but have used
>> 735000 inodes (IDs) to track them.
> 
> Ron, thanks for the explanation. I had multiple thousands of tiny files in /
> var/spool/exim4 so... deleting them freed up those inodes and solved this 
> issue. Thanks for the super-fast response! :)
> 
> Speaking of which, I seem to have no need for exim4, is this a safe thing to 
> remove to prevent this from happening again?
> 
>>> On Sep 28, 2017, at 9:49 AM, Ron Kelley <rkelleyrtp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Deleting/moving files off the partition should fix the problem.
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 28, 2017, at 9:48 AM, Thomas Delrue via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I'm in a bit of a bind and have never seen this before so if anyone can
>>>> explain to me what is happening, that would be great:
>>>> 
>>>> I have a machine that keeps reporting that it's run out of disk space.
>>>> So I do the usual "df -h" and get this:
>>>> username at host ~ $ df -h
>>>> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>>>> /dev/root        12G  3.9G  7.1G  36% /
>>>> devtmpfs        997M     0  997M   0% /dev
>>>> tmpfs           999M     0  999M   0% /dev/shm
>>>> tmpfs           999M  9.5M  990M   1% /run
>>>> tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
>>>> tmpfs           999M     0  999M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
>>>> 
>>>> But it reports that it has no more disk space, so I dig a little deeper
>>>> and I find that I could also run df with the -i (inodes) flag, which
>>>> gives me this:
>>>> 
>>>> username at host ~ $ df -hi
>>>> Filesystem     Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
>>>> /dev/root        735K  735K     0  100% /
>>>> devtmpfs         250K  1.4K  248K    1% /dev
>>>> tmpfs            250K     1  250K    1% /dev/shm
>>>> tmpfs            250K  1.2K  249K    1% /run
>>>> tmpfs            250K     3  250K    1% /run/lock
>>>> tmpfs            250K    16  250K    1% /sys/fs/cgroup
>>>> 
>>>> I appear to have "run out of inodes"? Is there a way to reclaim them?
>