Yeah....I had that happen once. A log went haywire and filled my partition. Manually cycling logs (and fixing the problem that caused the log-spew) fixed it.

SW64 and garpu -- that turned out to be the problem.

I checked that there was room on the / partition, to be sure that I could write to the files in /var/log. But it never occured to me to check /tmp, which (like SW64) I have on its own partition. When I finally did, there were zero free blocks.

And of course root has access to that reserved five per cent or whatever of the file system, so root can write to /tmp when a regular user can't.

I wish I'd gotten back to this earlier. I switched to a different computer for all my work stuff, and once I had a working system, this problem fell off the front burner.

I do hope this thread helps people. And thanks to everybody who contributed suggestions.

Panthan

3 members found this post helpful.

Glad you've found the cause of the issue!

Next time, save yourself some hassle making /tmp not a separate partition and even better a /tmpfs, including in /etc/fstab this line:But then, do not put in /tmp something that should survive a reboot

Just my , of course.