[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: /var partition seems locked or read only




On 07/25/2014 10:54 AM, berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> First time I have exhausted inodes, but I never used apt-cacher-ng
> previously, and it's quite obvious that a proxy+cache is very greedy in
> terms of inodes.

Not really. That's like saying the parking lot is greedy in terms of
parking spots, after you just drove a bunch of cars into it. :)

Inodes are files/folders, files/folders are inodes. (1-to-1)  Anything
that has a bunch of files/folders will use a bunch of inodes. Same
number in fact.


> The nice thing here is that I have learned a lot of this error, and
> maybe someday I'll be able to help someone else in a similar situation,
> or be able to understand better partition systems.

Learning is good, keep it up. :)  Others have already told you the long
term fix (copy data, reformat, copy back), but there's another option.

Inodes are a per-filesystem instance thing.  If you can free at least 1
inode on /var, then you can:
create a file
mkfs.ext4 (or whatever) it,
temporarily loopback mount it somewhere,
move a large folder's (inode-wise) contents into it,
umount it, add it to fstab, then remount.

A bit complicated, but it's something you can do on the live system
without external drives. Technically the loopback mounted file doesn't
need to be inside /var, but you have plenty of storage space there, so
why not use it.


> 
> One of my defects is that I always try to tweak things... (with time
> I've learned to not do that when the target is very important) but at
> least it allows me to learn. By failures :)

Yeah.  Choosing the bigfile option when formating doesn't really save
drive space.  It does simplify the filesystem records a little as ther
are fewer records to keep track of.

In fact it can possibly end up using more space if you have a bunch of
smaller files.

If you do reformat /var, I wouldn't use xfs. As others have mentioned,
it has a few oddities that can cause issues if you're not fully
prepared.  By all means create a sparsefile or regular loopback mount to
play around with it, but for important stuff on your system, stick with
what you know.

- PaulNM


Reply to: