[vox-tech] I'm out of space on /

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 11:28:01PM -0500, Jay Strauss (me at heyjay.com) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was trying to install kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686, on debian sarge.  But 
> I'm getting:
> 
> dpkg: error processing 
> /var/cache/apt/archives/kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686_2.6.8-16
> _i386.deb (--unpack):
>  failed in buffer_write(fd) (8, ret=-1): backend dpkg-deb during 
> `./lib/modules/
> 2.6.8-2-686/kernel/sound/pci/trident/snd-trident-synth.ko': No space 
> left on device
> 
> I don't know what's taking up space and what I can delete.  I did a
> 
> hydrogen:/# du -hxs *
> 2.7M    bin
> 8.3M    boot
> 0       cdrom
> 88K     dev
> 6.9M    etc
> 1.0K    initrd
> 0       initrd.img
> 79M     lib
> 12K     lost+found
> 3.0K    media
> 6.0K    mnt
> 385M    proc
> 3.3M    root
> 3.6M    sbin
> 1.0K    srv
> 0       sys
> 13K     tmp
> 0       vmlinuz

That's part of the answer.

You need to specify your filesystems too.  If you're running a single
filesysytem, the above is comprehensie.  Looks like you're missing /var
and /usr from there.

'df -h' is what you want to show.  In my case we'd see:

    Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/hda2             228M  196M   21M  91% /
    tmpfs                 475M  4.0K  475M   1% /dev/shm
    /dev/hda1              38M   28M  8.8M  76% /boot
    /dev/hda9             259M  154M  106M  60% /tmp
    /dev/hda10           1004M  818M  187M  82% /var
    /dev/hda11            3.0G  2.8G  143M  96% /usr
    /dev/hda12           1004M  493M  512M  50% /usr/local
    /dev/hda13             12G   11G  742M  94% /home

(I like lots of partitions ;-)


To track down specific filesystem usage, I like:

   du -sx * | sort -nr

...which will sort utilization of directories (and files) within the
current directory.  Going down the subdirectories tends to be pretty
fast due to disk caching.

A really nice graphical utility for identifying where storage issues
exist is 'filelight':

    http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/

...which shows usage graphically, allows drilling down to see what
specifically is using space.


My current partitioning recommendations are here:

    http://twiki.iwethey.org/Main/NixPartitioning


> Now I'm a bit afraid to reboot my machine, for fear its been left in a
> damaged state.

Should only be the new kernel that's not properly installed.  Since its
installation didn't complete, you shouldn't have to worry about it.

Bootable disks (Knoppix, LNX-BBC, DSL, etc.) will pretty much always get
you back into your system even if you've mucked something up badly.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
    - Princess Bride
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