[TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

If you want, simply remove the exim4 package via apt-purge or something similar.  That should fix it for you…


> On Sep 28, 2017, at 10:21 AM, Thomas Delrue <delrue.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, September 28, 2017 10:19:46 AM EDT Ron Kelley wrote:
>> What OS are you running (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc)?  The easiest fix is to simply
>> stop and disable the exim4 process.
> 
> Debian 8 
> 
>> 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?
> 
> I get a 
> "no mail for <username>"
> 
>>> 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?
>