Markus Egg said the following on 02/06/2013 09:11 AM:
Hello,
I had SuSE 10.3 installed on my laptop. Backup of /var/spool/news onto some NAS was ok.
Then formatted swap (swap filesys), / (ext4 filesys) /var (ext4 filesys) in the same size it was before. No other special settings,
*THAT* was your mistake. The 'defaults' are 'general purpose'. 'News' has specific needs.
just the ones that are given and used by yast2 and SuSE 12.1 and ext4 .
Installed SuSE 12.1 which was ok. When I tried to play back /var/spool/news with all the leafnode usenet news, after some time the system said something like "No space left on device" :-(
And was it data space or inode space that had run out? Probably inode space since news files are fairly small. This is a well known, well documented problem. You can google for it :-(
The partition has exactly the same size.
Irrelevant with the ext FS model. You have a fixed number of inodes at mkfs time.
With SuSE 10.3 there was no problem concerning size.
Were there any changes in the filesystem structure of SuSE 12.1 and ext4, e.g. inodes or similar, which makes /var under SuSE 12.1 run full earlier?
How can I solve that? Reinstall with ext3 and SuSE 12.1 ? Put /var under / and reformat /var (which might be tricky)?
The problem with the ext series of file systems is that they have a fixed number of inodes at mkfs time. There are a number of ways you can trade-off space of inodes vs data depending on the types of files. The man page discusses this. But it is done at mkfs time and as you said, the installation formatted for you using the defaults. man mkfs.ext4 says <quote> -i bytes-per-inode Specify the bytes/inode ratio. [...] Be warned that it is not possible to expand the number of inodes on a filesystem after it is created, so be careful deciding the correct value for this parameter. </quote> You may also want to look at mke2fs.conf(5) which has a set of parameters for making ext file systems. In particular there is an entry of 'news'. It used to be that file had explanations of each stanza ... *sigh* *MY* "solution' is not to use an ext file system. I use ReiserFS which is dynamic about its allocation. There are no fixed numbers of inodes. This is how things *should* be, in MNSHO. You should not be tied down to having to get your initialization parameters right. This is also why I use LVM - I don't want to have to get the size of the partition and FS 'right' to start with! Personally I would create a new partition for 'news' since the demands may be different from the general needs of /var. Again, since I use LVM this would be easy for me. This is also why I'm experimenting with the BtrFS. -- "The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out." -- JRR Tolkien, -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org