In the past few days, I've updated several computers at work from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11 (f11). After unsuccessfully trying "yum update -y" on one of the computers, its /var directory filled completely. I tried to run yum-complete-transaction to take care of the remaining 102 elements to be installed/updated, but it responded with error messages saying "No space left on device."

The "df" command shows that /var is full.
[root@my_machine ~]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 5036316 347392 4433092 8% /
/dev/sda5 5036284 5036284 0 100% /var
/dev/sda7 15219840 226416 14220300 2% /home
/dev/sda1 2016016 43708 1869896 3% /boot
/dev/sda2 30233928 4097128 24600988 15% /usr
/dev/sdb1 59084932 15562428 40521164 28% /u/b
tmpfs 384532 564 383968 1% /dev/shm

Here is what I get when I enter "yum clean all".
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in <module>
yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 309, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 166, in main
base.doLock()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 1173, in doLock
while not self._lock(lockfile, mypid, 0644):
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 1229, in _lock
os.write(fd, contents)
OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device
[End of output from "yum clean all"]

I'm a scientist and have limited experience as a sysadmin. This is my first post. Any suggestions? Thanks!

You can check what directory contains by running the following:

You may be able to manually select files that can be removed to free up some space. Alternatively, you could move a directory onto another partition and create a link in the original /var partition. For example if you have a games directory and wished to move it you could:

A coworker helped solve my problem in which my 5GB /var partition became completely full during an unsuccessful attempt at "yum update -y" in Fedora 11 (f11). He suggested that I enter:
cd /var
du -sh *
That showed that /var/log contained about 3.5GB. A little further checking revealed that two files were responsible for almost everything: /var/log/messages (2.3GB) and /var/log/gdm/:0.log.4 (1.2GB). I deleted those files and was able to run yum-complete-transaction -y

I'll have to keep an eye on the log files to determine why they grew so large in only a few days.

Maybe you're not running logrotate on those to keep them purged. For /var/log/messages that would be unusual, its the std install to do so. Maybe the system had issues (could be that update that did it...)

Hi All,
I am working on Fedora core 11. Without my knowledge some of the files from /var and /etc got removed and i am not able to boot-up the machine.


1. I copied whole /var directory from fedora core 9 through single user mode
2. Now i am able to boot the system with the below steps
- Edit grub loader with "single" user mode login
- # init 4
- # startx
Then the system is directly going to desktop without asking any user name and password(user login screen fails to load)

I think somewhere i am missing some config files to overcome this problem. Please help me to solve this issue.

Thanks in advance,
Ravi