[ILUG] puzzle

[Brendan Halpin]

Brian Brazil <bbrazil at netsoc.tcd.ie> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 12:53:05AM +0100, Ciaran Johnston wrote:
>> 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%.
>
> You can use tune2fs to change it on the fly. You can also change what
> user/group can use the reserved space. Note that having a disk this full
> is likely to cause fragmentation.

I haven't seen this before -- normally (?!) free space chips away
to zero and then everything grinds to a halt. The problem was
triggered by an "apt-get upgrade" after a big interval -- it
downloaded about half a gigabyte onto a relatively small old
laptop.

I need a new laptop!

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