Unable To Change Admin Pass

[Bone Head]

When I try and change the admin pass on our Plesk box I get this error:
Unable to change the administrator's password: Not enough disk space.

Is there a fix for this?

I have done a search and cant find anything that matches this problem. Its a 1&1 server and they dont seem that keen on helping folk with their root servers so any advice would be greatly appreciated.
TIA
Bone

 

[breun]

I wouldn't know how much disk space is needed to change a password (I'd say not a lot ), but have you checked if you don't have some partition filled up completely?

 

[Bone Head]

/dev/md1 is 94% full, I havent got a clue whats causing that there is pretty much just one site on the server!

Thanks for the reply BTW

 

[breun]

I don't know how big that partition is (I guess /dev/md1 is mounted as /?) and how big your site and other data is, but it could be log files filling up your disk if they're not being rotated.

 

[Bone Head]

I went through the directories on the server using putty and got rid of quite a few large log files. It has made no difference though to the size of that directory when viewed via the control pannel.

How would I find out which directory dev/md1 is on the server? Ive been using plesk for about 5 years in various flavours I use it because it meansI donthave to get myhands too dirty with linux.

Once again any help would be greatly appreciated. I have caried out a search on these forums and using google but nothing has turned up that helps.

 

[breun]

Run df -h to see what is mounted as what and how much space is left on each partition.

 

[Bone Head]

Here are the results:





Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1 950M 912M 0 100% /
/dev/md5 4.7G 1.4G 3.4G 28% /usr
/dev/md7 137G 2.0G 135G 2% /var
/dev/md6 4.7G 18M 4.7G 1% /home
none 493M 4.0K 493M 1% /tmp

 

[breun]

Well yes, it seems like / doesn't have too much space left. Though you'd think that 38 MB of free space would be enough to change a password.

 

[Bone Head]

Any ideas what I can do about it and how I go about it, there is a huge ammount of space free on the drive doing nothing

 

[breun]

See if you have anything stored on the / partition that you don't really need there. In /root you might have psa and/or swsoft directories containing the downloaded Plesk packages (downloaded by the autoinstaller and/or Plesk Updater). It should be safe to remove these directories.

In general you can use the du command to find out how much disk space something is using. The following will tell you how much every one of your top-level directories is taking up (might take while!):

cd /
du -sh *

You can cd into a directory and run du -sh * there to see how much each of the subdirectories in there takes up. I'd check /root first for the directories I mentioned above.

Usually I go with just a small /boot partition, a 2*RAM /tmp partition and use the rest as /. Would have prevented this problem.

 

[Bone Head]

OK Ill take a look again, is there any way to make the partition bigger?

Thanks very much for your help.

 

[breun]

Only if you're using LVM (it looks like you don't) and you'll first need to shrink another partition if all all of your disk is already partitioned (which is probably the case). You could maybe get an extra drive, copy over the / filesystem using dd (and expand it afterwards) and make sure you change your fstab properly afterwards.

Have you already checked if you can find some stuff on that partition that you can get rid of?

 

[Bone Head]

Please forgive my ignorance I had a look last night but if the md1 directory is actually the / directory surely anything in the root of the drive is taking space? Does that include all the directories in the root of the drive too? Im a bit confused about that, after all every file on the server is in the root of the drive isnt it?

I can see I need to do some more reading up on linux.

Im just about to dissapear for a couple of days ill have another look when i get back.

 

[breun]

Please forgive my ignorance I had a look last night but if the md1 directory is actually the / directory surely anything in the root of the drive is taking space? Does that include all the directories in the root of the drive too? Im a bit confused about that, after all every file on the server is in the root of the drive isnt it?

It can be, but since you have separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home and /tmp any files under those locations will be stored in separate partitions. But all other files (/root, /opt, etc.) will all end up in that 950 MB partition on /dev/md1.

The Linux filesystem is very flexible. You can't add a drive on a Windows machine and use its free space as C:\Windows\Temp for instance, while on Linux you can add a drive and mount it as /tmp (when previously tmp was a directory on the / partition). Flexibility is nice, but can be confusing I guess. LVM adds the ability to easily resize partition and even join multiple disks into large partitions, etc.

 

[Bone Head]

Thanks very much for clearing that up for me. Ill spend some time over the weekend and try and either resize it or delete some more log files.