No inodes free on /var

[Darren Wyn Rees <merlin@netlink.co.uk>]

Trying to reconstruct a set of news archive, I recently ran out of inodes.

debian:/home/merlin# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              61M   34M   23M  59% /
/dev/hda2             182M   15k  173M   0% /tmp
/dev/hda3             7.3G  5.1G  1.9G  73% /var
/dev/hda5             1.8G  717M  1.0G  40% /usr
/dev/hda7              26G   21G  3.6G  86% /home

debian:/home/merlin# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              16064    6026   10038   38% /
/dev/hda2              48384      14   48370    0% /tmp
/dev/hda3             977280  977280       0  100% /var
/dev/hda5             244320   43436  200884   18% /usr
/dev/hda7            3489792  290203 3199589    8% /home

I don't recall the installation process... if there a choice
of setting how many free inodes (as there is, say, with FreeBSD).

How can I back out and recover from the above, bearing in mind, there's
around 3-4GB of news articles sitting on /var ?

-- 
Darren Wyn Rees