On 2015-03-20 Kevin McGregor wrote:

I have a Ubuntu 10.04.3 (I know) system with many old kernel images. The problem (maybe) is I've been told the system is out of inodes. I

Oops.

thought I would try to get rid of at least one old kernel image, and this happens:

$ sudo apt-get -y purge linux-image-2.6.32-28-server linux-headers-virtual: Depends: linux-headers-2.6.32-66-server but it is not going to be installed or linux-headers-2.6.32-66-generic-pae but it is not installable

"not installable" may indicate out-of-space/inodes. Or you have some weird combo of dep packages installed for the old kernel (-28) that aren't also in the new (-66). Perhaps the inode problem has screwed things up on earlier updates. I would start by clearing up several thousand inodes elsewhere on the system. This could be as simple as popping on a usb stick or external drive and mv'ing a bunch of stuff from a home dir or data dir to it temporarily. Once that is done, then fight with apt-get. Curiously, what does df -i / and df -k / say? Did you tweak the NBPI / other inode specs at mkfs time on this box? Very weird a non-tweaker user would run out of inodes these days... not like us inode tweakers :-) (Trevor motto: if it's tweakable, tweak it!)

When I see a system run out of inodes, it's usually because there's some directory full of little or zero length files there somewhere. I didn't learn this until recently but Linux will store the file contents in the inode itself if it's under a certain size (around 60 bytes). So it's possible that you don't even notice the space drain until you run out of inodes. Sean On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 6:09 PM, Trevor Cordes <trevor@tecnopolis.ca> wrote:

On 2015-03-20 Kevin McGregor wrote:

...

I have a Ubuntu 10.04.3 (I know) system with many old kernel images. The problem (maybe) is I've been told the system is out of inodes. I

Oops.

...

thought I would try to get rid of at least one old kernel image, and this happens:

$ sudo apt-get -y purge linux-image-2.6.32-28-server linux-headers-virtual: Depends: linux-headers-2.6.32-66-server but it is not going to be installed or linux-headers-2.6.32-66-generic-pae but it is not installable

"not installable" may indicate out-of-space/inodes. Or you have some weird combo of dep packages installed for the old kernel (-28) that aren't also in the new (-66). Perhaps the inode problem has screwed things up on earlier updates.

I would start by clearing up several thousand inodes elsewhere on the system. This could be as simple as popping on a usb stick or external drive and mv'ing a bunch of stuff from a home dir or data dir to it temporarily. Once that is done, then fight with apt-get.

Curiously, what does df -i / and df -k / say?

Did you tweak the NBPI / other inode specs at mkfs time on this box? Very weird a non-tweaker user would run out of inodes these days... not like us inode tweakers :-) (Trevor motto: if it's tweakable, tweak it!) _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

-- Sean Walberg <sean@ertw.com> http://ertw.com/

On 2015-03-23 Kevin McGregor wrote:

We had done no tweaking when setting up the server.

$ df -i / Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/mapper/thing 294336 292531 1805 100% /

I'll try looking for stuff to rm.

How big is the fs? df -k /? 294k inodes seems *extremely* small for an OS default! For comparison, my Fedora boot partition is 380MB and has 102k inodes. So unless your / fs is only 1GB or so (highly unlikely!) it seems very odd your distro would choose an NBPI that provides only 294k!!!