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tune2fs: Free Space in a Storage Partition

June 1st, 2009
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The ext2, 3, and 4 filesystems by default all reserve 5% of their capacity for the root user. While this is very important for partitions that contain /var or / (the root of the operating system), it can be a waste of space in drives that are only used for file storage. After making a ext4 partition I realized that I didn’t change the default setting. Instead of having 3.6TB of usable free space on my new hard drive I only had 3.4TB. After a quick google search I found an Ubuntu forum posting with a similar issue: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-215177.html

The command I used is very simple:

# tune2fs -m 0 /dev/md0

Where /dev/md0 is the partition you are configuring. For more help check out the manual page for tune2fs  (# man tune2fs  )

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Back Online After Server Failure

June 1st, 2009
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This is exactly why I backup as frequently as I do. During this entire process no data was lost.Yesterday my webserver starting acting very strangely. I attempted to upload some photos to my photo gallery. It would not let me create any new content, but I could still view all of my content that was already posted. I SSH’d into the server and found that my system load was at 280 (!!!) and growing by about 2 points per minute. I checked some logs and couldn’t really figure out what was going on. No process was showing a major increase in resource consumption and there were no signs of extra traffic. I tried to close out all of the terminal windows I had open, but two of them would not lose, no matter what I tried (killing processes, etc.). After 225 days of uptime, I figured I should just reboot the system.

I waited a few minutes but the system never came back online (not even enough for me to ping it). I waited untill about 10 minutes after I gave the shutdown command and then forcefully turned it off. I brought it into my room to work on it and plugged it into a monitor to see where the problem was (I usually run my servers headless). I turned on the power and… Read more…

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