[ILUG] puzzle

[Ciaran Johnston]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 00:18, Brendan Halpin wrote:
> I've got myself into an awkward state with "apt-get upgrade" on my
> laptop. I think the problem has to do with apt-get reserving disc
> space and somehow not yielding it. df tells me I have 0 k free
> space in /, but the "used" amount is less than the partition size.
> Moreover, root can write despite the no-free-space, but users
> cannot.

Probably because space is reserved on the filesystem for the superuser. Not 
sure how much, but 5% seems to ring a bell. I believe it is tunable - ah, 
yes, from "man mke2fs"

       -m reserved-blocks-percentage
              Specify  the  percentage  of the filesystem blocks reserved for
              the super-user.  This avoids fragmentation,  and  allows  root-
              owned daemons, such as syslogd(8), to continue to function cor‐
              rectly after non-privileged processes are prevented from  writ‐
              ing to the filesystem.  The default percentage is 5%.

Cheers,
Ciaran.

> As you can imagine this is wreaking havoc! Not least 
> because a side effect is X coming up with no glyphs, and gdm
> crashing after a time-out.
>
> What's going on?
>
> Brendan
> --
> Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
> Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
> mailto:brendan.halpin at ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html