4.8 - / out of space

[David Kelly]

On Jan 3, 2005, at 4:31 PM, McCy Ron wrote:

> System: FreeBSD 4.8 with standard config on PII/400...used mainly as a 
> backup server.
>
> df shows...
>
> Filesystem  1K-blocks    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/ad0s1a    128990  119660    -988   101%    /
> /dev/ad0s1f    257998       4  237356     0%    /tmp
> /dev/ad0s1g   7426528 2109420 4722986    31%    /usr
> /dev/ad0s1e    257998   15888  221472     7%    /var
> procfs              4       4       0   100%    /proc
>
> My root file system is full and I can't account for why this is so. I 
> used du on all of the directories on / and could only come up with 
> 28000K of usage - far short of what it's supposed to hold. The User 
> Manual suggests that there my be some files not accounted for by du 
> actually residing on the system. What is the best way to reclaim this 
> space?

A common goof is for a root user to mistype a device name causing a 
file to be created in /dev/ containing the data which was written. Tar 
will happily create such a file.

Another goof is for root to "write" to an unmounted filesystem. Later 
when the filesystem is mounted the written files are hidden yet still 
consume space on the fs containing the mount point (usually /).

If the results from "du -xsk /" and "df -k /" are not real close then I 
suspect you have written files in a directory which was later used as a 
mount point.

dkelly at Opus [1003] du -xsk /
59003   /
dkelly at Opus [1004] df -k /
Filesystem  1K-blocks  Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a    253678 59004 174380    25%    /
dkelly at Opus [1005]

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.