Full /home hoses a box

[Michael Hipp]

Mike Reinehr wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 June 2005 12:35 pm, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
>>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?

> Are you attempting to login (ssh) as root or a normal user? A normal user 
> would not be allowed to login with a full /home disk.

I'm trying it as a normal user. I don't allow root to ssh in on any of 
my boxes. (Perhaps this should be re-considered.)

What exactly prevents the login when /home is full? I've been able to 
login before when /home didn't even exist (i.e. was unmounted).

Michael