SUMMARY: /home: out of inodes

From: Jay Peng (jay@panasonicfa.com)
Date: Tue Apr 13 1993 - 02:24:26 CDT


Greeting Sun-Gurus,

        My original inqery:

> We have a SS2 as our NIS server (SunOS 4.1.2 and OW 3). In the morning,
> the following messages repeatedly come out as our users run some program:

> /home: create/symlink failed, no inodes free
> Apr 9 10:59:37 panasun vmunix: /home: out of inodes
> Apr 9 11:00:29 panasun vmunix: /home: out of inodes
> Apr 9 11:00:30 panasun vmunix: /home: out of inodes

> My question: 1, what cause this happen?
> 2, how can correct it?

Thanks to:
bobr@houston.nam.SLB.COM Fri Apr 9 17:37:57 1993
deb@beaux.ATWC.Teradyne.COM Fri Apr 9 14:46:24 1993
nlf@aluxpo.att.com Fri Apr 9 14:55:33 1993
aluxpo!nlf (Nelson Fernandez)
lct@ai.mit.edu Fri Apr 9 14:56:11 1993
stern@sunne.East.Sun.COM Fri Apr 9 15:58:55 1993
hightowr@cadre.af.mil Fri Apr 9 16:19:44 1993
era@niwot.scd.ucar.EDU Fri Apr 9 18:27:03 1993
david@srv.PacBell.COM Fri Apr 9 18:49:07 1993
don@mars.dgrc.doc.ca Fri Apr 9 19:00:31 1993
trc@bridge2.NSD.3Com.COM Fri Apr 9 19:56:53 1993
phil@compnews.co.uk Fri Apr 9 20:00:04 1993
guy@auspex.com Fri Apr 9 21:10:09 1993
solomon!kevinc@qiclab.scn.rain.com Fri Apr 9 23:21:52 1993
ca@mine.informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de Sat Apr 10 03:45:20 1993
canuck@masc38.rice.edu Sat Apr 10 09:32:59 1993
lem@usb.ve Sat Apr 10 21:17:16 1993
andataco!andataco.com!louis@UCSD.EDU Sun Apr 11 12:40:58 1993
tellab5!vpnet!trdlnk!mike@uunet.UU.NET Sun Apr 11 21:17:32 1993
>From babb@k2.sanders.lockheed.com Mon Apr 12 10:05:26 1993
>From cal@soac.bellcore.com Mon Apr 12 11:05:13 1993

Most people pointed out this is due to a lot of small files users created in
the /home filesystem. This is indeed true. And the suggestions can be roughly
categorized into
I) short term:
   1),run the find in cron to find out the small size (zero size) file and delete
      them daily.
   2),for emurgency, shutdown the system into single user mode and move/delete
      some users' unneeded files.
II) long term:
   1), dump the partition and run newfs specify a somewhat big inode parameter.
       such as :
          /usr/etc/newfs -i 1024 /home
       to double the inodes space. The by-effect is the date space will become
       smaller.
   2), Reorganize the whole filesystem.

What I did is ask some users delete some out-of-date files, and the filesystem
immediately become operable. After that I checked the /home filesystem and found
users have multiple repeated copies of some software. So I did some organizing
work on the filesystem. It look like there is no need to re-newfs in our
case right now, though it is the best and long term worry-free solution.

Thanks !
  

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* Jay Peng * *
* System & Network Staff * Email : jay@panasonicfa.com *
* Panasonic Factory Automation * UUCP : ...!psinntp!panasonicfa.com!jay *
* Franklin Park, IL 60131 * Tel : (708)288-4549 *
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