Watch your inodes !

Today I got a strange bug doing apt-get update which gave me 404 error for each repository. At first I though it was the apt package which ran out-of-date but when I tried to install it manually dpkg said something like : “No space left on device”. Trying to touch something achieved the same result. So I did :

# df -h /var

But it said that about 1GB were available on that filesystem. Then :

# tune2fs -l /dev/sda11 | grep “Free”
Free blocks: 276171
Free inodes: 0

There were no inodes availables on the filesystem. I always though that filesystem have enough inodes in it so we don’t have to care about that but actually squid created many small files, worrying about blocks usage but not about inodes usage. I got it fixed by deleting the squid’s cache directory and setting squid.conf to use less top-level and sub-level directories.

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