"Daddy, something's wrong with the filesystem..."
(Herein is an apparent problem with free space reporting. Presented in
"Rambling Story" format for the author's and possibly even your
entertainment.)
So I woke up this morning, looked outside and found that the winds were
sufficent enough to do the raking for me, and decided, let's go for some
sort of activity that involves indoor work. I decide, I wanna do a firewall
or something, or at least poke around with same. Of course, this requires I
compile in the capability into my kernel, so I figure that this serves as
the perfect excuse to upgrade to 2.4.13, just because I'm a bleeding-edge
weirdo that way (why else would one run Unstable?).
So, after doing the apt-get upgrade of the week, download kernel source
(always fun on a 56K modem), untar, make menuconfig, yadda yadda yadda. Make
dep, make bzImage - eep, out of space? Apparently I'd overfilled /usr to the
point that it only had space left for untarring the kernel source, and there
was *just* not enough left for it to compile a kernel.
Ahso. Delete a few archives of source in there; who needs the backup tarball
of the current kernel source anyways? Live dangerously, that's not my motto.
Search through dselect, remove a few packages, et cetera, et cetera. Yay,
/usr should now have some space!
Type df to check this. It reports 0 blocks available on /usr.
The hell.
Remove a few more bits and pieces. That ought to fix it, right?
Type df. 0 blocks available.
Okay, something's screwed. Bring down system (fortunately it's a laptop and
I'm the only user), get copy of tomsrtbt, pop it in, run e2fsck -f.
No errors. Plenty of inodes and blocks available.
Ohhhkay. Now this is freaky. Bring system back up, get on IRC, consult with
Older Sister *nix Guru. She puzzles, says essentially "this is a type of
voodoo that I ran into with Slack once" and suggests I yank out the hard
drive, put it in another computer, boot that computer into Linux
(+GNU+whateverelseisintheOS), and run e2fsck from *there*, and all will be
well.
Bleah. Oh well. Pull out hard drive, spend half hour looking for 2.5" to
3.5" connector converter, plug hard drive in alternative computer, boot,
e2fsck -f.
No errors reported.
Right-O. Ohkay. Well, maybe it did some sort of voodoo incantation thereon.
Put hard drive back in laptop, boot up laptop.
Type df. 0 blocks available.
Ohkay. The f**k.
Get back on IRC. Report to Older Sister *nix Guru that her voodoo didn't
work. Am asked "Can you back up and reinstall?" Which I can't - don't have
the available backup space, time, bandwidth or sanity. So. Ugh.
In last great act of defiance, decide to try apt-get installing something
anyways.
This is how I reported it to IRC:
<Joanne> /dev/hda7 963911 923505 0 100% /usr <--
from earlier.
<Joanne> Then I try "apt-get install wmmatrix" (little wm applet) just as a
test.
<Joanne> Install is successful.
<Joanne> /dev/hda7 963911 923613 0 100% /usr
<Joanne> Note how the number of used blocks has changed.
So. Attempt to restart kernel compile. Make clean, make dep, make bzImage
modules modules_install. No problems or reports of "no more space". Used
block count increases. Available block count always stays zero. Et cetera,
et cetera. New kernel is all compiled.
*whimper*
So, in short, I seem to have this problem with free space reporting on my
/usr partition. It's not currently a blocking problem, but it's slightly
disturbing. I don't know if this is a bug in df, or a bug in my filesystem.
Enlightenment (not the WM!) on this matter would be much appreciated, as I
get extremely paranoid when things like this seem to mystically happen. Is
my /usr partition about to explode? Or am I the victim of a vicious bug in
fileutils?
Remember, only YOU can enlighten the worried ones. *AuntSamanthaposterlook*
And thank you for making it this far through my rambling. :)
--
/"\ Joanne Rosemary Hunter
\ / (jrhunter.at@at.menagerie.DOT.tf) {http://menagerie.tf/jrhunter}
X <--(ASCII Ribbon Campaign - No HTML Mail or postings!)
/ \ Of course I don't know how interesting any of this really is,
but now you've got it in your brain cells so you're stuck with it.
-Gary Larson
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