1

there should be plenty of space:

nicholas@mordor:~$ 
nicholas@mordor:~$ sudo df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                      1.6G  2.6M  1.6G   1% /run
/dev/mapper/vgubuntu-root   72G   68G     0 100% /
tmpfs                      7.8G   16K  7.8G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                      5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                      4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda2                  512M  7.9M  505M   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs                      1.6G  1.7M  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000
tmpfs                      1.6G  892K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1001
tmpfs                      1.6G  940K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1004
nicholas@mordor:~$

I've only ever looked at /dev/sda2 and not the "root" above with 100% use.

Having just launched the alpine e-mail client I went to save (meaning download) five e-mails in my inbox, I got:

                                       [Error writing scratch file: No space left on device]
? Help                < FldrList            P PrevMsg               - PrevPage          D Delete              R Reply               
O OTHER CMDS          > [ViewMsg]           N NextMsg             Spc NextPage          U Undelete            F Forward

which is very odd. Running du -sh is taking quite some time, here are the results so far:

root@mordor:/# 
root@mordor:/# pwd
/
root@mordor:/# 
root@mordor:/# du -sh *
0   bin
169M    boot
4.0K    cdrom
16K dev
17M etc
54G home
0   lib
0   lib32
0   lib64
0   libx32
16K lost+found
8.0K    media
4.0K    mnt
4.0K    opt
du: cannot access 'proc/114024/task/114024/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'proc/114024/task/114024/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'proc/114024/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'proc/114024/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
0   proc
34M root
du: cannot access 'run/user/1004/doc': Permission denied
du: cannot access 'run/user/1004/gvfs': Permission denied
du: cannot access 'run/user/1001/gvfs': Permission denied
du: cannot access 'run/user/1000/doc': Permission denied
du: cannot access 'run/user/1000/gvfs': Permission denied
6.0M    run
0   sbin
6.3G    snap
4.0K    srv
0   sys
13M tmp
7.0G    usr
6.9G    var
You have new mail in /var/mail/root
root@mordor:/# 
root@mordor:/# whoami
root
root@mordor:/#

which I ran as root as I was in the / dir.

I'm thinking that the boot partition is incorrectly configured and mixed up with the root directory somehow(?).

Nicholas Saunders
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  • Hi Nicholas. /dev/sda2 is only for booting. in this case all data and system is in /. Can you post the output of du -sh * while in / directory?. Most of the used space should be in /home. – jpbrain Jul 08 '21 at 21:55
  • I added some output @jpbrain – Nicholas Saunders Jul 08 '21 at 22:25
  • Ok. Boot partition is fine. you need to free space on home (your / LVM partition). is your trash empty? You can do the same command at home level to see where is the space taken. It is usually better to have home separated from / to not run into these issues. – jpbrain Jul 08 '21 at 22:37
  • Protip: use the `du -xk | sort -n` to find the largest directories on a single file system. – Simon Richter Jul 09 '21 at 07:03
  • Does this answer your question? [df -h - Used space + Avail Free space is less than the Total size of /home](https://askubuntu.com/questions/249387/df-h-used-space-avail-free-space-is-less-than-the-total-size-of-home) – muru Jul 09 '21 at 07:41

1 Answers1

3

5% (by default) of the filesystem is reserved for cases where the filesystem fills up to prevent serious problems. Your filesystem is full. Nothing catastrophic is happening because of the 5% buffer. root is permitted to use that safety buffer and, in your setup, non-root users have no reason to write into that filesystem.

If you have daemons that run as a non-root user but that need to manage files in that filesystem, things will break. Time to find more space.

matigo
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  • _"in your setup, non-root users have no reason to write into that filesystem."_ - They very much do; `/home` and `/tmp` are on the same filesystem. In fact, looking at OPs `du` output, `/home` is probably the reason the root filesystem is full in the first place. – marcelm Jul 09 '21 at 09:21