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Date:      Sun, 16 May 2004 22:24:38 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Disk full / NFS, df, and du
Message-ID:  <20040517032438.GE80376@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <40A82BAB.7030005@centtech.com>
References:  <40A82BAB.7030005@centtech.com>

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In the last episode (May 16), Eric Anderson said:
> I have a few large NFS file servers, holding about 1Tb of diskspace
> each.  I break those logical disks (it's on a hardware RAID) into
> partitions, and share them.  My users fill up the partitions often
> enough, and when they do, they rm entire directory trees to free the
> space.  They use du to determine how much space is in a directory and
> how much they are hogging.
> 
> The problem I'm having is, after they do the rm's, it doesn't free the 
> disk space.  df shows it still being used, but du claims their 
> directories are empty. 
> 
> If I reboot the file server, the space magically appears.
> 
> I was thinking that it was because a process was using the data, or
> directories the data was removed from, so the blocks weren't actually
> freed, but that seems a little odd to me, since they claim (and
> different users have the same issues, and make the same claims) that
> nothing should be touching those areas at all.
> 
> How do I get FreeBSD to release those blocks without rebooting?

Does a du on server itself show files?  How about "lsof +L1"?  The NFS
protocol doesn't allow clients to unlink files they have open, so
FreeBSD clients (at least) rename open files that are unlinked to
.nfs##### until the last process closes the file, and then they delete
it.  If you've got unlinked files held open, it's got to be on the
server itself.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com



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