Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 09 May 2000 11:46:17 -0400
From:      Mitch Collinsworth <mkc@Graphics.Cornell.EDU>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Cc:        mkc@larryboy.graphics.cornell.edu
Subject:   3.0-R server /var running out of inodes (not a usenet question)
Message-ID:  <200005091546.LAA73551@larryboy.graphics.cornell.edu>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

This is mystifying.  I have a server running 3.0-R that serves DNS, ntp,
NIS, NFS, sendmail, imap, pop, majordomo, DHCP, and syslog.  That might
seem like a lot but the user base is small (less than 100) and the machine
count is something less than 256.  NFS serving is minor for this machine.
Most NFS load is on a different system.  The cpu load is normally very low
and the machine just hums along, usually.

The strange things is that every once in a blue moon this system goes
belly-up with the message "/var out of inodes" on the console.

After rebooting it looks like this:

# df -i -t ufs
Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity iused   ifree  %iused  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a     99183    20053    71196    22%    1015   24071     4%   /
/dev/da0s1e    992239      548   912312     0%      36  249818     0%   /tmp
/dev/da0s1f   1984479   834699   991022    46%  102187  397779    20%   /usr
/dev/da0s1g   1984479   536817  1288904    29%    9222  490744     2%   /var

Note that /var only has 2% of inodes in use!  Hunting through my log
files I don't find any clues suggesting what happened.

Has anyone seen anything like this before or have any thoughts what the
cause might be?  It happens so infrequently that I don't get many chances
to try to debug it, and when it does the priority is to get it back online
as quickly as possible being that it's a critical resource.  (Everything
but ntp and the e-mail services are redundantly served by other machines,
but of course panic sets in quickly when people can't check their e-mail
once per minute!)  If I'm not right here when it happens, someone else
reboots it and I don't even get to see the console!

-Mitch


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200005091546.LAA73551>