ZFS Problem - full disk, can't recover space :(.

[Dr Josef Karthauser]

On 27 Mar 2011, at 10:41, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> I'm curious about something -- we use RELENG_8 systems with a mirror
> zpool (kinda funny how I did it too, since the system only has 2 disks)
> for /home.  Our SpamAssassin configuration is set to obviously writes to
> $user/.spamassassin/bayes_* files.  Yet, we do not see this sparse file
> problem that others are reporting.
> 
> $ df -k /home
> Filesystem 1024-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> data/home    239144704 107238740 131905963    45%    /home
> $ zfs list data/home
> NAME        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
> data/home   102G   126G   102G  /home
> 
> $ zpool status data
>  pool: data
> state: ONLINE
> scrub: resilver completed after 0h9m with 0 errors on Wed Oct 20 03:08:22 2010
> config:
> 
>        NAME         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
>        data         ONLINE       0     0     0
>          mirror     ONLINE       0     0     0
>            ada1     ONLINE       0     0     0
>            ada0s1g  ONLINE       0     0     0  26.0G resilvered
> 
> $ grep bayes /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf
> use_bayes 1
> bayes_auto_learn 1
> bayes_ignore_header X-Bogosity
> bayes_ignore_header X-Spam-Flag
> bayes_ignore_header X-Spam-Status
> 
> $ ls -l .spamassassin/
> total 4085
> -rw-------    1 jdc       users      102192 Mar 27 02:30 bayes_journal
> -rw-------    1 jdc       users      360448 Mar 27 02:30 bayes_seen
> -rw-------    1 jdc       users     4947968 Mar 27 02:30 bayes_toks
> -rw-------    1 jdc       users        8719 Mar 20 04:11 user_prefs

No idea what caused it, but whenever I ran the bayes expiry it created a new file that just blew up and filled all the available space. I've got around the issue temporarily. I used 'swapoff' to recover a 4Gb swap partition, created a UFS and mounted that in the jail in question. After rsyncing the bayes database to that disk I was able to run an expire with no trouble at all, so it wasn't that the bayes was corrupt or anything. I've now copied it back and it runs fine. I expect that the problem will reoccur at some inconvenient point in the future.

I'd really like my disk space back though please! I suspect that I'm going to have to wait for 28 to have that happen though :(.

Joe