no free inodes

[Dan Pelleg]

Perica Veljanovski <ezhe at euro.net.mk> writes:

> Hi, 
> I'm running Squid proxy whitch logs to mysql trough perl scripts on FreeBSD
> 4.7-RELEASE.
> 
> last week it froze and I had to do a hard reboot, and since then it's
> showing strange errors.
> 
> for example, vhenever I try to edit something in vi:
> -------	
> 	IBM:/usr/local/squid/sbin#vi example
> 	/var: create/symlink failed, no inodes free
> 
> 	+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
> 	Error: /var/tmp/vi.recover: No space left on device.
> 	Modifications not recoverable if the session fails; example: new file:
> line 1
> 	Press any key to continue: 
> --------
> 
> allsow, somethimes when I reboot it shoes: "no inodes free"
> 
> I'm not very experienced with FreeBSD, but it is stil my favuret :)
> 
> So, what seems to be the problem here?

Like the messages say, you ran out of inodes. This can happen if something
(most probably squid) created lots and lots of tiny files.

The band-aid solution would be to look in /var, find those files and delete
them. To prevent this from recurring you want to tell the offending
application to use a filesystem with more capacity. Most often this can be
done with a symlink.

The best thing to do long-term would be to create a filesystem that is
better suited for small files. See the tuning(7) man page, search for
"newfs". If you don't have disk space for a new filesystem you can even
create one inside a file with vnconfig(8) - see the handbook for an
example.

-- 

  Dan Pelleg