Hi there,

I have created a group - lets call it mygroup.
I have created a user - let's call him myuser, he is a member of mygroup.
He has a home directory of /home/myuser.

I have a directory that myuser is responsible for, lets call it mydirectory (original, or what!). This directory is located in /dir1/dir2/dir3/mydirectory.

dir1, dir2 and dir3 are owned by user root and group root. mydirectory is owned by user myuser and group mygroup (although it was formerly owned by root). User, group and others have full read, write, execute access into mydirectory.

If myuser tries to copy anything into mydirectory from his home directory, he gets a 'No space left on device' error (although there is tons of space on the server). I can only presume it is a rights issue, but I can't see why or how since he owns mydirectory.

Does anybody know what might cause this behaviour?

P.S. I am connecting remotely to a RedHat 7.1 server via Putty if this helps.

Many thanks,

Malcie.

It is worth noting that mydirectory is an Apache web directory. Could Apache be affecting access to this directory? (I'm not too familiar with Apache - Nor Linux for that matter). This problem is getting me down!

Thanks again,

Malcolm.

You can have all the space in the world open on your hard disk, but if you run out of space on a particular partition, then you can't write to that partition. Check the size of the partition that mydirectory resides on, and check the usage on that partition. It may be out of space, especially of it's not on the /usr partion (which should be the vast majority of your system unless is configured specifically for a certain purpose, for instance a DNS server, which shouldn't have that many users to begin with).

If that's not the issue, scan your disk for errors, primarily for surface errors. There may be a bad sector on the disk that is preventing any write operations from completing.

To check the diskspace allotted and used for a particular filesystem:

df [filesystem]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that if I try the same copy command as root, it works no problem.

I will try out your suggestion anyway to see how much disk space is allocated - even if it turns out not to be the problem, it would be good to find out such information (I didn't build the server and wouldn't have known how to find out such info).

Thanks Rumblefish,

Malcie.

Thanks Rumblefish,

After your suggestion I did what you said and found the filesystem in question to be full. Got rid of a couple of HUGE files - everything now OK. Thanks a lot.

How could root write to the filesystem though if it was full?

Thanks again,

Malcie.