LinuxQuestions.org - Please help! Login failed

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Please help! Login failed

I rebooted my box this morning (RHEL5.8, 64 bit) and tied to log in as a regular user, but got this message:

GDM could not write to your authorization file. This could mean that you are out of disk space or that your home directory could not be opened for writing. In any case, it is not possible to log in. Please contact your system administrator.

When I log in as root, my user home directory has plenty of space (>1TB out of >2TB), it can be opened and accessed. I can login from the command line

Code:

su - yaximik

and this puts me into my home directory.

Please help to identify and fix the problem.

Code:

sudo df -hT

output please

known error..
cause: full disk space either on /home /tmp or Desktop may have large amount of data that filled the disk space.

Code:

df -hT

would sure of a help as in above comment.

Code:

[root@G5NNJN1 ~]# df -hT

Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

              ext3    62G  2.0G  57G  4% /

/dev/sda3    ext3    244M  32M  199M  14% /boot

tmpfs        tmpfs    48G    0  48G  0% /dev/shm

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02

              ext3    124G  5.1G  113G  5% /usr

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03

              ext3    124G  118G    0 100% /tmp

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04

              ext3    62G  4.3G  55G  8% /var

/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-HomeVol

              ext3    3.6T  1.3T  2.2T  38% /home

/dev/sde1    ext3    1.8T  765G  977G  44% /media/FantomHD2

/dev/sdf1    ext3    1.8T  1.3T  503G  72% /media/Ext2TB-A

/dev/sdg1    ext3    1.8T  397G  1.4T  23% /media/Ext2TB-B

/dev/sdd1    ext3    1.8T  196G  1.6T  12% /media/FantomHD

So it looks like /tmp is full, but why user login is affected but not root login? My tmp directory (home/yaximik/tmp) is actually very small (164 KB).
Content of the /tmp:

Code:

classload-1386040376302            scim-panel-socket:0-root

classload-1386870482953            scim-panel-socket:1-yaximik

FLEXnet                            scim-panel-socket:2-root

gconfd-root                        scim-panel-socket:3-yaximik

gconfd-yaximik                      scim-panel-socketlocalhost:1-yaximik

hsperfdata_root                    scim-socket-frontend-root

hsqldb.pWX20158                    scim-socket-frontend-yaximik

keyring-4CnvIE                      sfcbLocalSocket

keyring-okmESR                      sosreport-VYamshchikov.886856705-109849-bf3056.tar.bz2

keyring-wdc2BX                      sosreport-VYamshchikov.886856705-109849-bf3056.tar.bz2.md5

mapping-root                        ssh-HKGwns9780

mapping-yaximik                    stapsSmFXi

orbit-root                          tmp-df57426a-e506-477d-9d56-9fc8f77f3ad0

scim-helper-manager-socket-root    virtual-root.1pTyw8

scim-helper-manager-socket-yaximik

Can someone pls advise what can be safely deleted?

[SOLVED] Please help! Login failed

The /tmp directory contained a 127GB chunk of a database backup file that was created just prior the problem happened, which filled it up. After deleting it everything is back to normal. Thanks for help!

The question still remains - why user login, but not root login is affected afer filling up /tmp?

The reason for this lies deep in the usage of /tmp, why it is created and how it has a significant role in the file system hierarchy.

IT contains various files those are temporarily generated for being used by programs to run. root is independent but not normal users they need a place to write their temp data and hence results in login failure when they are not able to do that.