df says disk is full, but it is not
- by Chris
On a virtualized server running Ubuntu 10.04, df reports the following:
# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 7.4G 7.0G 0 100% /
none 498M 160K 498M 1% /dev
none 500M 0 500M 0% /dev/shm
none 500M 92K 500M 1% /var/run
none 500M 0 500M 0% /var/lock
none 500M 0 500M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda3 917G 305G 566G 36% /home
This is puzzling me for two reasons: 1.) df says that /dev/sda1, mounted at /, has a 7.4 gigabyte capacity, of which only 7.0 gigabytes are in use, yet it reports / being 100 percent full; and 2.) I can create files on / so it clearly does have space left.
Possibly relevant is that the directory /www is a symbolic link to /home/www, which is on a different partition (/dev/sda3, mounted at /home).
Can anyone offer suggestions on what might be going on here? The server appears to be working without issue, but I want to make sure there's not a problem with the partition table, file systems or something else which might result in implosion (or explosion) later.
