OH NO! IT says my root partition / is full but it isn't! Why is FreeBSD lying about space?

[rtsit]

We FOUND IT.

We did do the procedure that Michael recommended, but unfortunately none of the nfs mount labels /var /usr /tmp contained any data after booting into single user mode.

What we did find was a NFS folder that contained a huge 300 meg .tar.gz file that wasn't finished downloading. (Was a BSDSRC tree that was tar'd gz'd)

Have to watch for massive NFS file transfers of abnormally large files -- that is what caused the issue.  Next time we'll use WGET instead while sitting at the /usr partition instead of the root folder.



________________________________
From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org>
To: rtsit <rtsit at yahoo.com>
Cc: "freebsd-questions at freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, November 7, 2011 1:13 PM
Subject: Re: OH NO! IT says my root partition / is full but it isn't! Why is FreeBSD lying about space?

rtsit <rtsit at yahoo.com> writes:

> I did reboot the machine a few times, hoping that any process in
> memory that still claimed ownership of an open part of the disk would
> release it.

There are other things that can cause disk space to seem to disappear,
but there is a reason that one is in the FAQ list and the others aren't;
it's virtually always the cause when someone reports such a problem on
this list.

> Didn't work. I'm going to try the other method recommended by Michael
> Sierchio -- to reboot in single user mode and try and clear out any
> directory structures that could exist that my mount labels could be
> hiding.  Thanks for the reply and helpful link.

If the mounts are shadowing files, that will certainly hide data use.  
I hope that turns out to be the issue and you get it fixed quickly.

> (It was nice to not see a RTFM response, but a helpful link -- it is appreciated).

I don't agree with you here.  My response *was* RTFM, and I don't see
anything inherently wrong with that.  I'm glad it was helpful.

Good luck.