Tales From /proc

I'm a UNIX Sysadmin, specializing in Solaris and Linux. We should ALL know this stuff, but sometimes a trick or tip slips by, so every time I teach someone a neat trick (or someone teaches me a neat trick) it'll get shared here.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

What the HECK just happened??

A friend of mine in a cutting edge Solaris 10 environment was telling me about a very interesting problem he had.

They run ZFS on Solaris 10, with snapshots for easy data recovery.

A particular ZFS pool fills up. Users get that dreaded "No space left on device" message.
So they decide to help, and try and delete some files, and they get:

user@host$ rm somestuff
rm: Cannot remove 'somestuff': No space left on device.

You can probably guess what happened.

"somestuff" would be snapshotted when removed, but the pool is full.
since the pool is full, somestuff cannot be snapshotted even when removed

Chris Siebenmann has a great post on just this very thing here.

Always something to keep in mind when designing ZFS filesystems: You might want to keep some space in reserve, especially if you use snapshots.
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About Me

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I am currently a Unix Systems Engineer for a cloud-based EMR company. I've been making large, complex systems "go" since 1995. I've worked with Novell and Exchange in the past, and now specialize in Solaris and Linux.