On Tuesday 19 April 2005 02:30 pm, L. Mark Stone wrote:
We have been asked by a new client to work on a pre-existing SuSE box running 9.0 Pro, with Reiser 3.6.
The partition/dev/sda7 is 16GB and holds /, but there is something bizarre going on. Running df -h shows the root partition as nearly full (140MB free). Running KDirStat shows only 1.7GB of files on the root partition.
We were told the server several months ago complained of the root drive being full, so they moved the tree holding a local copy of the 9.0 DVD and some data directories to a separate partition. The only changeable files on / now are in /var/log/, and we pruned out a bunch of old log files to make some space.
This server is in use pretty much 24x7 as a file dispatcher. It is sent and transfers about 3GB of files per day to/from various other computers on the WAN, so we are reluctant to take it down for any length of time.
Are there any tools I can use to check the partition while it is mounted? I don't expect to repair the partition while it is mounted, but I would like to show the client some test results that demonstrate that the box needs to be taken offline to run reiserfsck.
Reiser does weird things when it gets full. It's a great filesystem in general, but it does *not* like to be more than 85% to 90% full. You can run reiserfsck while a filesystem's mounted, but the system has to be mounted read only. This makes sense, because you don't want the file structure changing in the middle of a verification. :) I'd probably take the machine to single-user mode (telinit 1), remount the filesystem read only (mount /mount/path -o remount,ro), then bring the system back in to multi-user mode if it can handle being run in read-only mode for a little while. If the machine has to be up and running read-write, though, the only option is to bring the thing down (or add another disk as a temporary root so you can fix this problem root partition). Be prepared to spend several hours waiting for reiserfsck to run if it has to fix any problems on a large filesystem. I'm running an Athlon 900 system for a maildir-based mail server (with a 10K RPM Seagate Cheetah drive holding about 15GB of mail & ~10GB of misc other files), and it takes probably 4 hours to run --rebuild-tree on that thing. --Danny, who generally likes Reiserfs, but hates to fix it