Portupgrade failure: / filesystem full.... any suggestionsshort of full-scale re-install?

Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P. kdk at daleco.biz
Thu Sep 16 11:25:06 PDT 2004


dfarmour at myrealbox.com wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I'm not sure what's next: hedgehogs falling from the skies, perhaps? Mostly, I know 
>I'm flailing around in the newbie waters, an otherwise straightforward 5.2.1 install 
>(single user, desktop) gone horribly, horribly wrong. The story so far... 
>
>  
>

And what have you against hedgehogs? Or is it just that they
might hurt if they hit you?

>I got through most of the sysinstall program without too many surprises. It's a new 
>machine, 40G HD. Loosely following Mr. Lehey's configuration suggestions in 
>Complete FreeBSD, / got 4G, swap 2G, and /home the rest.
>
>  
>

[snip rest of sad story]

We love Mr. Lehey, of course, although my last attempt to get one
of his books on Ebay went awry. However, I've read vinum(8) once,
I think --- and found his website pretty interesting. ;-)

That said, I wouldn't partition a drive in this way. Here's a report
on the disks on my workstation:

$df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a 989M 149M 761M 16% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
/dev/ad0s1e 34G 17G 14G 56% /usr
/dev/ad0s1d 989M 410M 500M 45% /var
/dev/ad1s1d 180G 14G 152G 8% /backup
//ROOT at HOUSE/SHAREDDOCS 19G 15G 3.8G 80% /house

Even allowing that the users in (/usr)/home on my system are using
approximately 13GB, there's still 4GB in /usr, and another half GB
in the root and /var filesystems, which in my case are seperate
partitions.

Most certainly in doing cvsup+buildworld+buildkernel and friends,
you're going to take up space with /usr/src and /usr/obj. By installing
the instant-workstation port, you're going to be filling up 
/usr/ports/distfiles
and /usr/local.

Fetch is probably holding "temporary" files open in either /tmp or /root,
so it's not inconceivable that your / is up to its 4 GB maximum as /var,
/tmp, and /usr are all in your root fs...

Greg Lehey's recommendations have, AFAIK (but I'm no expert) never been
the same as the ones recommended by /stand/sysinstall (and therefore
the project??) However, generally there's nothing wrong with his ideas,
and certainly he would know better than a peon like myself. BUT---IIRC,
sometime in the last few months he was discussing this very issue on
the lists, and mentioning that his thought on the subject had changed
a bit (and perhaps he's changed his recommendations in a later edition?)

As for what you might do ... one workaround might be to move some
things like /usr/src, /usr/ports and /usr/obj to your big filesystem:

$cd /usr
$mv ports /home
$ln -s /home/ports ports

I don't think this would cause any problems, and might be a way
to manage until later. I guess you could just do it that way permanently.

There would be other options, too, of course...

Kevin Kinsey


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