[TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Thomas Delrue via TriLUG]

On Thursday, September 28, 2017 10:09:52 AM EDT Ron Kelley wrote:
>Exim4 seems to be a mail transfer agent (MTA).  What do you use for your mail
>program on your Linux box?  Postfix, sendmail, etc.

Nothing to my knowledge. Should I be using something?
It appears that it's cron that's trying to send mail (and failing, causing the 
thousands of little files in /var/spool/exim4/) but honestly, I don't really 
know why cron would be trying to do that. Is there a way to turn that off?

>> 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?

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