Root partition lockout

[RGamboa]

Hi, folks:

I'm running RedHat 8 and filled up my root partition. I deleted some files to bring the amount of free space on that partition back up, but now df is reporting the following:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 7925051 7538991 0 100% /
/dev/hdc1 8583124 5803877 2334167 72% /usr/local
/dev/hdd5 14771944 9272604 4748964 67% /opt
none 256532 0 256532 0% /dev/shm
none 256532 0 256532 0% /dev/shm

Note that even though there's almost 400MB unused on the / partition, none of it's available. The file system, for whatever reason, thinks it's read-only. Does anyone know how to correct this condition?

At first, I thought it might have been a journalling issue (the partition's formatted ext3), so I deleted and recreated the journal. That's not it. So then I tried to see if lsattr could tell me anything about the root partition. No immutable or read-only flags. That's not it. I can touch and create files as root, but not as any other user (like, my normal login account), so the filesystem really does think it's read-only. Which really sucks when it comes to saving my Maelstrom high scores

As a workaround, I copied the contents of the /home, /var/log, and /tmp directories to the /opt partition and remounted them to their original locations using 'mount --bind', so at least I can start X-Windows and check my mail, but that doesn't take care of the root problem.

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks...

 

[Morsing]

When filesystems are created, space is set aside for root only. You will probably be able to use the 400Mb as root. The reserved space defaults to 5%.

This is a security issue that insures that root can always login and work.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
IBM Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration

 

[RGamboa]

Thanks, Henrik! Your response was right on target. I did a tune2fs of the partition in question, and it showed that there were fewer free blocks than reserved ones. When I deleted enough files, or moved them to one of the other partitions, such that the free block count dropped below the reserved block count, the partition became available again.

Thanks for your help.