Something strange happened to my unmanaged vps yesterday. Everytime i upload muliple files from ftp, it says that disk quota exeeded. Hemm…maybe my user quota has reach the limit. So i try to fetch a single tar file as root with wget, and extract it. But… it says again that disk quota exeeded :hammer: root user has a limit? How wonder :amazed:

In fact, i only used 7 GB of my 20 GB disk storage capacity, so positively not because i ran out disk storage capacity. Then i login into my virtuozzo vps panel and i saw a strange status

disk inode stat

see stat under red mark? Yup, my disk inodes quta has reach the limit

What is Disk Inodes ?

well, full and explainable article can be found here

but for simplycity, inodes is file identification number of each file in unix/linux system, contain information about like user and group ownership, access mode and type of file. 2 different file that have diffrenet information will create 2 inodes, but 2 file that has exactly the same information will only create 1 inode

You can see inode information of a file by using this command

# ls -i filename

For example :

# ls -i /etc/yum.conf
111087302 /etc/yum.conf

111087302 is inode number of /etc/yum.conf

Or you can use stat command

# stat yum.conf
File: `yum.conf’
Size: 333 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 1ch/28d Inode: 111087302 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r–r–) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2009-10-12 13:04:16.000000000 -0400
Modify: 2009-01-22 05:53:44.000000000 -0500
Change: 2009-09-29 07:55:08.000000000 -0400

How To fix this ?

Because of my disk inodes quota is ran out, my vps is almost useless, i can’t upload new file, even i can’t create new tables on mysql databes :hammer:

The answer is simple : Contact your VPS hosting provider, because nothing we cand do about it, only the hosting provider can raised disk inodes quota.

Don’t bother to look other methods, it useless