Example error message for "No space left on device"



Problem

/etc/cron.daily/dpkg:
 cp: error writing 'dpkg.status': No space left on device
gzip: .//dpkg.status.0.gz: No space left on device
 mv: cannot stat './/dpkg.status.0.gz': No such file or directory
 /etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
 error: Compressing program wrote following message to stderr when compressing log /var/log/apache2/ssl_access.log.1:
gzip: stdout: No space left on device
 error: failed to compress log /var/log/apache2/ssl_access.log.1
 run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1
 /etc/cron.daily/man-db:
 gdbm fatal: read error
 run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/man-db exited with return code 1


Identify what consumes most of the disk space. To get an overview of the allocated disk space:

root@mylinuxhost ~$ df -h

Filesystem		Size	Used	Avail	Use%	Mounted on
udev			7.0G	   0	7.9G	  0%	/dev
tmpfs			1.6G	169M	1.4G	 11%	/run
/dev/sda1		3.7G	1.8G	1.9G	 49%	/ro
/dev/md0p1		772M	772M	   0	100%	/rw
aufs			772M	772M	   0	100%	/


Here we notice that / and /rw are at 100% usage.

Now we need to find the files which are flushing the filesystem. For this, we can use the command: du -sh


We start from / to search for the big file:

root@mylinuxhost ~$ du -sh /*
root@mylinuxhost ~$ du -sh /rw/*


This command will list all files & directories below /* and /rw/* and the size of these files.

You need to check the big directories and continue executing du -sh to find the files.

Possible solutions

If you have a big file, please verify:


Increasing the filesystem

If your filesystem is too small, you might want to consider increasing the filesystem.

Workaround / Solution if the filesystem is sized to 800MB:

→ Now you're able to use the new 4GB size for the rw volume

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