Have you ever had one of those errors that were just baffling but also so severe that you decided to reinstall your operating system?
I just had one of those. You see, I decided to reboot my system - I was going to back up one of my DVDs in Windows XP (since I don't yet trust K3b to do that... yet). Everything went as normal over there, and I rebooted back into SUSE 9.3 - that's when the problems started.
First, I got errors along the lines of "unable to access I/O device" when I tried to use OpenOffice to open my "A Different World" paper and "unable to open file - out of disk space" when I tried to open my USB flash drive --which I thought was really odd, since what does disk space have to do with my USB flash drive?!? Also, I haven't done anything that would take up much disk space on my flash drive. So, I transferred my flash drive over to my Windows 2000 machine, and deleted some files, and moved it back over to SUSE. Once again, I got "unable to open file - out of disk space." I decided that I had no time left to troubleshoot, so I decided that I'd just lock the machine and proceed to my other planned task.
When I returned, I was with new resolve... I would reboot and I knew that HAD to fix the error... I could only think of something failing to start with the OS had to be the problem... Although, SUSE should have reported that to me.
To my disdain, I now had even more error messages. Several regarding an inability to load configuration files, and even firefox messaging me about how it's "not the default browser" anymore. I was using my very limited knowledge of Linux to attempt to figure out what would be causing all these errors. That's when I noticed that one of the errors said something along the lines of "could not write to file
/tmp/...." Couldn't write... I'VE HAD AN ERROR LIKE THAT BEFORE!! I was overjoyed... Back in Mandrake 9, one of my directories in my /home folder somehow ended up becoming the owner of root... Meaning that I couldn't write to it in the necessary ways required for Linux to modify my configuration files (that it has to do at each boot)... The fix was easy, just change the owner back to "indigo" and restart the machine. But in SUSE, would it be the same for the /tmp directory?Unfortunately no. I attempted to use tty2 to run my
chmod commands... That way, I would be sure that I knew was *exactly* happening. But I found that I couldn't do a "Ctrl + Alt + F2" (or any other F# key). There was no way to switch to a tty... Half of the system was locked into a state of idle, and I couldn't seem to find a way out of it. I, in my infinite wisdom (italics to add sarcasm) decided to once again reboot the system.Upon loading, everything looked normal, but I know that I could do a "Ctrl + Alt + F2" to get to tty2 at the login prompt normally, but it wasn't working now for some reason. I decided to log into the system, and just use
Konsole to do my chmod commands. I got so many error messages when I logged in, that KDE just sort of "attempted to turn over" (think old car in the middle of winter) but just failed right back to the log in prompt. As did Gnome. Nothing was working... My errors were getting worse, and I just kept thinking that it had something to do with this /tmp directory.I wondered if I could use the SUSE installation CD to do a "rescue system" that would allow me to reconfigure all of the config files... It was a shot in the dark, but at least it was something. Unfortunately, I know so little about the SUSE system, that I wasn't able to figure out exactly what to do... It looked a lot like the rescue that MCSE people are familiar with, and as any MCSE person can tell you, there's not a whole lot you can do in there without knowing what you really need todo. So, after trying to figure out exactly what I should do, I surrendered and decided to reboot. I was going to reinstall SUSE 9.3, there was just nothing else I could think of to do. But I was going to try getting into SUSE one last time... Who knows, maybe just loading into the Rescue console caused it to reset something that would allow the system to start working normally again.
I was surprised that I was able to log in, but I was extremely happy about it. There were signs of sunshine on the horizon. But I still got a lot of "unable to load file
/tmp/..." and "unable to open file - out of disk space" -- this time, I decided to check my partitions. I did it earlier, but it was in a utility that was difficult to read... This time, I was going to use KDiskFree, a utility that had easy to read columns:Device, Type, [Partition] Size, Mount Point, Free (space remaining), Full %, UsageUsage was really useful, it's a horizontal bargraph that is green when things are in the acceptable range, light green as they get worse, and eventually red when there's nearly no space left on the partition.
Well, here's what it looked like:
/dev/sda6 reiserfs 20.0 GB / 0 B 100% [||||||||||||||||||||]/ (root) was at 100% capacity?! Good G*d Man! That's why the system wasn't working correctly. I knew that I had to get some things off there, but that was the cause of all of my troubles. But how did the system fill up so quickly? I kept wondering if SUSEWatcher automatically downloaded something that maxed out the partition, or maybe it was something that I did when installing an application... But the system usually has integrated space management utilities in each of those areas to inform me how well each partition is doing... In fact, that's why I never started KwikDisk, the system just monitors itself so well, that I just didn't really need it.
Either way, I was in a difficult position... I needed to get something uninstalled, and what would be on root that shouldn't be anyway? I decided to uninstall some of the stupid games that I put on there ages ago, and never use. It wouldn't be much, but at least it'd get me some space back. In the process of using ncurses YaST, I suddenly thought, "
/tmp!!" That had to be it... There must be something in there!I quickly accessed the directory and was browsing it... That's when I saw it. You see, before I started dong all of my DVD copying stuff in Windows, I was trying to work with an application in Linux to do it. Unfortunately, the Linux application isn't the greatest, and would always end up in failure. So I just abandoned the projects in Linux and proceeded to complete those same tasks using my DVD-ROM in Windows 2000 - and then transferring those files over to Windows XP and burning them using Nero.
But what I didn't think about, was that when the Linux application fails, it had already put some stuff in
/tmp, where it would sit, waiting for me to return to attempt to restart the project. After attempting to copy three DVDs in Linux, I was using up nearly 14 GB of space in /tmp alone! My root had been maxed out, but everything was working normally, until my system files (which are stored in root) needed to be saved and later reloaded from root... Which was already at capacity. I simply deleted all the DVD files that were in
/tmp and restarted the system, and everything was normal again.To think, I nearly lost my OS over this one... It makes me sad.
On a side note though, it has taken me twice as long to type this blog entry as it did for me to actually troubleshoot through all of that... And I have started KwikDisk.
