Whelp, lesson leaned: Don't let ZFS run out of space

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FnordMan

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 22, 2011
Messages
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Thankfully this wasn't my array but was still an interesting experience to get solved.

One quickly runs into a chicken and the egg issue in that you need space to delete something but you don't have the free space to delete anything. (array had 0 bytes free)

Thankfully one can still get a console on FreeNAS (their web UI is nice but it's weird to find anything when one is used to a console) so with the help of the internet I found this lovely little solution:
Code: 
cp /dev/null <afile>
which reduces the file to 0 bytes, thus freeing up space.
 
I don't think I've ever seen a volume so full that I couldn't delete something. However, I've never really used the more exotic (thinking zfs, btrfs, etc..) filesystems long term enough or in a way to bump into that. Is that something unique to ZFS, or did you just get a one-off weird experience?

I liked the solution. Gave me a chuckle and "Yep. that'd work." :D
 
Frobozz said:
I don't think I've ever seen a volume so full that I couldn't delete something. However, I've never really used the more exotic (thinking zfs, btrfs, etc..) filesystems long term enough or in a way to bump into that. Is that something unique to ZFS, or did you just get a one-off weird experience?

I liked the solution. Gave me a chuckle and "Yep. that'd work." :D
Click to expand...

Far as I know, that's unique to ZFS. Btrfs in theory has the same problem but they hold back a bit of space for exactly that reason. Couldn't find anything about ext4 but it may have the same problem and the same solution as btrfs.
 
By default ext4 reserves 5% of the partition capacity to prevent this kind of issue.
 
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