When the user fills up the hard drive

[Bjoern Ottervik]

Ext2/3 filesystems already reserves a cetain percentage of space for 
superusers by deafult, to make sure you can always log in - in single 
user mode - and free up space if something like this happens.
Ext2/3 is still the default filesystem for Ubuntu, and I think it's a 
safe bet that anyone who is linux savvy enough to think they should be 
going around changing the default filesystem would also know how to 
mount partitions from a live environment and free upp space if something 
like this happens...

Though I guess it wouldnt hurt to have a good and to the point warning 
when users are starting to fill upp their quota, explaining that it will 
cause them some difficulty. :) (provided that one is not already in place.)

/Björn Ottervik

Sean Hammond wrote:
> I'm told that if a user fills up the entire hard drive on Windows XP
> and then restarts the machine Windows will more or less keep running,
> because a certain amount of space is always reserved for the page
> file. So the user will still be allowed to login, although the system
> will probably complain lots and go very slow. But they'll get warnings
> about the disc being full and have a chance to take action.
>
> I recently got a panicked phone call from an Ubuntu user who had
> filled the disk (disc?) up. It's partly his fault -- he ignored
> Ubuntu's warnings that he was running out of space and kept
> downloading, then restarted the computer. When you do this on Ubuntu,
> you find that you can't login to GNOME. It doesn't give you any reason
> either, just drops you back at GDM. So the user suspected that the
> problem was due to lack of disc space, but at this point could do
> nothing to free up space, and couldn't even get to the Internet to
> search for help. All he could do was phone me up and say 'Help! My
> essay is due today and I can't login!'. Ubuntu, like other linux
> distros, goes down pretty hard when you fill up the disk. I've also
> noticed that when the disk is full, but not so full that you can't
> login, random things will happen, such as the network card
> disappearing from the system, until you free up space and restart.
>
> Maybe this is worth a bug report?
>
> When I install Ubuntu for myself, I create seperate partitions for /
> and /home. I don't do this when I install it for others, cause I don't
> want to give them a non-default setup. By doing this I can reinstall
> Ubuntu or install another Linux without having to backup and restore
> /home. I think it might also prevent GNOME from failing to login, as
> even if I fill up /home, / will still have some space. Am I right?
> Does this mean that Ubuntu should use this partitioning scheme by
> default?
>
> Either way, something needs to be done to prevent the system from
> going down so hard if the disk gets filled. In the case of the user
> who phoned me, I had to switch to a virtual terminal, login, explore
> his home directory and find some suitably large yet unimportant files
> to remove, mount his external hard drive manually, then move the files
> onto it, unmount the drive safely, logout and switch back to GDM. I
> showed him what I was doing, but it's a pretty involved process that
> requires having a lot of Linux commands committed to memory. There's
> no way he remembered enough to do it himself in the future.
>
>