Re: No space left on device

From: Spamless (Spamless_at_Nil.nil)
Date: 08/26/03 

Date: 26 Aug 2003 15:56:51 -0400

In article <3f4bb581$0$15122$afc38c87@>, Kimberly Webb wrote:
> I'm a VERY new linux user trying to administer an existing linux box to
> allow remote dial-in access on our network. It's Red Hat Linux release 7.3,
> Kernel 2.4.18-5 on an i686.
>
> During boot up I get an error "no space left on device"
>
> What exactly should I delete to fix this? I assume there are log files I
> can get rid of but how to I navigate to them. Should I delete the files or
> just open them in vi and empty them? How do I even get into the /dev/hda2
> to do anything? A patient person that could provide step by step
> directions would be VERY appreciated. Many thanks in advance for your help.
>
> I already used pine to delete all the mail.
>
> [root@fluffy root]# df -k
> Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda2 1619164 1618780 0 100% /
> /dev/hda1 148345 5389 135297 4% /boot

I see no other mount points. No /usr, no /tmp.

Everthing (media files, temporary files, source code, etc.)
seems to be on a 1.6 Gig hard drive (maybe 2 Gig ... you probably
have a swap partition somewhere and there is the /boot partition).

To get to files, you can use the first disk in the CD distribution,
boot from that and type what is necessary to go to rescue mode.
The system will be in mnt/sysimage (I believe) whither you can
go to find the subdirectories to remove files.

That is rather a small hard driver on which to run a full
graphical linux. What GUI (Gnome, KDE?). What applications?
How much is in your /tmp directory.

You probably have lots of stuff in various "doc/" subdirectories.
When I had a small system (7 Gig hard drive with two copies of
Win95 and TurboLinux Workstation 6), I burned all the doc and
howto stuff to a CD and deleted them. You might then have
problems erasing them (using rpm) if you have an installed package
which wants to delete those files in order to remove the package.

With so small a disk, I would generally not save documents
on the hard drive, but burn to a CD-R and access them from there
(well, small document files you often use would be on the
hard drive, of course). You probably have lots of programmes
you don't use. Do you use pine and mutt and elm (mail programmes)?
Are they all installed?

Do you use vi and emacs and pico and joe and jed (plain text
editors)? Are they all installed?

Do you use lynx and links and wget and curl and w3m to get web
pages?

The distribution comes with many packages which duplicate each
others features, so you (and other users, *nixes are designed
as multiple user systems) can pick and choose.

If you are really tight for space, you can remove (rpm -e) the
"development packages" (whatever-devel-version.rpm). I used to
do that, and when I wanted to compile a programme, just
installed the ones I needed to compile, compiled and installed
the new programme, and then removed the *-devel-* packages again.

Then again, you could upgrade (or add) a hard drive. But, if your
current system has a 2Gig drive, the motherboard/bios may be old
(well, not too old) and only support hard drives up to 8Gig (try
and find a 7 or 8 gig hard drive - none made any more).

You could use an add in PCI card with a new IDE interface.

If you installed the kernel RPM, it comes with tons of modules
(for everything under the sun) (when you get enough room,
you could get a kernel source, compile with only the modules
you want, and install it).

Then there are the log files in /var/log which might have
gotten out of hand.

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