[vox-tech] debian woody to sarge upgrade = dead xserver

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Kendrick (nbs at sonic.net):

> What had actually happend in HIS case was some log files chewed up too
> much space on his little 1GB drive.  A friend from NBLUG was able to
> clear it out for him, and get it working again.  (He tried as root, while
> diagnosing the issue, and root could log in.  Root gets extra inodes and
> space, I guess :^) )

Yes.  When "df" reports that a filesystem has hit 100% full, there's
always some amount of reserved space that's not included in that "100%" 
figure, writable only by the root user.  (The amount is set at mkfs
time, and can be adjusted using the -m option to tune2fs.)

If you even only vaguely remember that fact, it'll ring a distant bell
in your head whenever you encounter "It works with root authority, but
with nobody else's" situations:  Yes, most of the time those are
ownership/permission issues, but it also could be overfilling a
filesystem.

> No room in "/tmp" since "/var/logs" was on the same partition, and
> chock-full of complaints about "lpd" or some-such...

Yeah, /tmp being full can cause some wacky errors.