Disk full / NFS, df, and du

[Eric Anderson]

I have a few large NFS file servers, holding about 1Tb of diskspace 
each.  I break those logical disks (it's on a hardware RAID) into 
partitions, and share them.  My users fill up the partitions often 
enough, and when they do, they rm entire directory trees to free the 
space.  They use du to determine how much space is in a directory and 
how much they are hogging. 

The problem I'm having is, after they do the rm's, it doesn't free the 
disk space.  df shows it still being used, but du claims their 
directories are empty. 

If I reboot the file server, the space magically appears. 

I was thinking that it was because a process was using the data, or 
directories the data was removed from, so the blocks weren't actually 
freed, but that seems a little odd to me, since they claim (and 
different users have the same issues, and make the same claims) that 
nothing should be touching those areas at all. 

How do I get FreeBSD to release those blocks without rebooting?

Eric


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Anderson     Sr. Systems Administrator    Centaur Technology
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
------------------------------------------------------------------