I get a strange error on /var, which is a separate 1GB partition. Whenever I try and create any files on it using touch, mkdir, etc., I get -

touch:no space left on device

df -h gives me over 280 MB free.

since my web folder is on /var/www/html, that means I can't upload any new content

Any ideas?? It seems there's a limit to the number of files I can make on /var . If I delete 3 files, I can then create 3 files. Already existing files can be written to even when I can't create new files. Very strange.

Perhaps you deleted a log file in which there is still and open pid trying to write to it?

df -h /var

du -h . /var/log | sort -n

Use the tools you have in place to determine what is taking up so much space..

It's not strange! There's a finite number of slots in the filesystem for holding filenames. If you have a large number of small files, it's quite possible to "fill up" a filesystem and yet still have free disk space. What's actually strange (read: silly and annoying) is that the error message you get is very misleading...

These slots are called inodes.
The inodes are the basic file-level data structure, and every file within the filesystem is physically described by one of them. The inodes contain information such as the file creation and modification times, the total file size, and a list of blocks that actually contain the file's data. For larger files, the latter can include disk locations for additional lists of data blocks (known as indirect blocks) or even double or triple indirect lists of blocks. Filenames are associated with inodes via directory entries, which consist of filename-and-inode pairs.

You can not change the number of inodes with out reformating the filesystem.

This may also be a problem with quotas. Some systems reserve a percentage of the filesystem for root...

Nope - it had to do with the inodes. There was a huge directory in /var called clientmqueue which was hogging about 480MB with millions of system emails. There were so many, even an rm -f * wouldn't get rid of them. I had to recursively remove the directory.

If I'm not mistaken - isn't clientmqueue used by older versions of sendmail?? There wasn't any sendmail, and Qmail was the MTA on the system, but i was told it hadn't been configured - apparently it must have been, beause some MTA delivered those system mails to clientmqueue. What misled me, is that there's nothing in /var/spool/mail.

This is what happens if people use dumb server control panels like plesk instead of having a sound knowledge of their box.

Thanks!!