Full /home hoses a box

[Michael Hipp]

One of my servers is hosed, I'm offsite and can't get to it until 
tomorrow. Nmap shows ssh and samba to be active as normal but all 
attempts to connect to the box are rejected.

Based on when it apparently went south I'm guessing that a runaway job 
has filled a disk (it was getting low on free GB anyway). But the 
overflow would have been only on /home which is its own disk.

I thought a full /home would be survivable. No?

What can I do to prevent this in the future? I'm loathe to use quotas 
because some of the accounts need large amounts of space at various times.

Any possible creative ideas to get the box to respond?

Michael