Linux – get “No space left on device” when running mail

emailhard drivelinuxusage

First of all I've checked these two solutions on serverfault but I'm still having issues.

Here's my problem:

root@myserver:/# mail
/tmp: No space left on device
  • Firstly I checked the filesystem usage by running df -k but all filesystem usage was under 25%
  • Then I ran df -i to check inode usage; maximum was 4% usage
  • I have emptied /tmp and /var/tmp and still get above error

Pertinent information:

  • I'm running Debian 6, postfix
  • Recently had to remove a number of rogue scripts which were planted in user www directories. They looked like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3328235/how-does-this-giant-regex-work these were being used to send high volumes of spam, and I've checked the mail logs and mail queue to ensure spam is no longer being sent. As a result, mail logs had grown very quickly. I have archived the large mail logs to another machine / deleted them, and done the same with all other large files in /var/log

Here's the output of df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda              20G  4.0G   15G  22% /
tmpfs                 249M     0  249M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  112K  9.9M   2% /dev
tmpfs                 249M     0  249M   0% /dev/shm
overflow              1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /tmp

Best Answer

overflow              1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /tmp

You have only 1 MB of tmp space

EDIT:

In this way you can increase size of /tmp

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/temp-disk bs=2M count=1024
sudo mke2fs -j /usr/temp-disk
sudo mke2fs -j /usr/temp-disk
sudo chmod 1777 /usr/temp-disk
sudo umount /tmp
sudo mount -t ext3 -o rw,noexec,nosuid,loop /usr/temp-disk /tmp
df -h
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