[TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Thomas Delrue via TriLUG]

If you don't want to get mails from cron, you can add this in your crontab:
MAILTO=""

On Thursday, September 28, 2017 10:26:02 AM EDT Ron Kelley wrote:
>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?

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