Full /home hoses a box

[Mike Reinehr]

On Wednesday 08 June 2005 02:38 pm, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 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

After I fired of my response, I began to reconsider. From my earlier Unix days 
I remember that when the root file system went below 10% available, all 
logins except root were prevented, so, it came to mind that if the /home file 
system was full, then perhaps user logins were disabled -- but I can't say 
that I've ever tried it.

As far as for /home being unmounted, any files created would be under /home in 
the root file system, so no harm -- although you would think that the lack of 
a home directory would cause some kind of error.

Anyway, I hope you find out the problem -- and let us know. :)

cmr
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