[TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

What OS are you running (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc)?  The easiest fix is to simply stop and disable the exim4 process.

Presumably, your OS is sending emails to an account due to some issue.  What happens if you type “mail” from the CLI?  Do you get a list of email messages?

-Ron




> On Sep 28, 2017, at 10:17 AM, Thomas Delrue <delrue.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?
>