(OT) Mailing list server problems

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 10:20:16AM -0800, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> 
> The server for our Mailman mailing lists runs in a VMware virtual
> machine under the old free VMware server on a CentOS Linux box.
> That machine hadn't come up clean, and I had to fiddle a bit to
> get things running again.  It wasn't until yesterday afternoon
> that I figured out that the root file system had been corrupted,
> and mostly disappeared after I booted off a Knoppix CD and ran a
> full 'fsck -f -y' on the root file system with everything in the
> /lost+found directory, largely useless.

What filesystem are you using?  I want to know which to avoid for life.  :)

> At that point, I removed the /lost+found stuff, ran another fsck,
> then tried to copy the root file system using rsync from the NAS
> box.  This failed as it said the file system was full, even
> though the 8GB file system should hold less than 5GB.  I tried
> again using find and cpio, with the same result.

This is sounding suspiciously like ext4.  You can have 100GB total, and
only 45GB of it in use, but you can exhaust the inodes if you're doing
heirarchical storage like Postfix spools, IMAP boxes...anything which
generates more inodes than space.  Try a `df -i`.

The -really- bad thing is that, due to one of -the- worst 'design'
decisions in recent history, ext4's inode table is static.  Whatever
number of inodes created at mkfs, that's what you have for the life of the
filesystem.  I have a few systems which need to be custom-built by doing
the install, then syncing everything to a spare filesystem which has enough
inodes, reworking the filesystem from scratch with a mkfs with a huge inode
count, then syncing everything back.  All of that is really bitchy under
LVM, too, depending -whose- recovery/live discs you use.  I actually need
one CentOS and one SuSE disk.  I could do it all with CentOS, had they
bothered to include `ls` on the frakkin' rescue disk.  I kid you not, no
`ls` existed on the one I was using for 6.x when I last hit this issue.
And SuSE and CentOS have differing ideas on how to address the devices and
grub, just adding fun to the mix.

I'm starting to suspect you're running ext4, especially as it's the default
filesystem for CentOS 6.x.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.