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As a prenote, I am extremely new to networking in general, and my knowledge is very minimal, even for things you guys would consider basic. I will try my best to keep up with any advice you have to offer.

Before I describe my issue, let me go ahead and establish my hardware/software:

Hardware

  • Server Host: OVH.com
  • Server Hardware: SP2 (click here for details)
  • Hard Drive: 2x120GB SSD

Software

  • Operating System: CentOS 6.4
  • Web Control Panel: Parallels Plesk 11.5

The Issue

Today, I had tried to log into a web application on my server, when I was greeted by the following error: Error 500 - MySQL failure?

This instantly alarmed me, as I was not aware of anything that would have triggered this to happen or cause me to run into an Error 500.

When I consulted the providers of this specific web panel, they told me it was either because the MySQL database that the web panel was dependant on had been cleared or there was some other kind of issue with it.

This instantly concerned me because I had not done anything to MySQL after the installation, and I hadn't even bothered with it since installation.

After running into this issue with the Multicraft panel, I immediately logged onto my Parallels Plesk 11.5 server, where I was greeted with the following. Warning: Not enough disk space? What?

The "Not enough disk space" was new to me and I had not noticed it before this point. Around this time, I was also having some minor issues with MySQL in Plesk, so I figured I would try out a reboot to see if it would be successful; however, after the reboot, I was greeted with the following error when connecting to my Plesk server afterwards: Error 28: No more room on the disk

After further inquiry, I was told to run df -h via SSH, and I received the following results: All of my filesystems have "caps" on how much data they can hold

I now realize that there are "caps" to the amount of data that I can hold in each directory. This was how the server was provided to me and by no means was this intentional, as it puts me in a significant quandary with how I manage my data.

I was then given the following advice that I should reimage my drive to correct this issue and to avoid data loss.

atomicturtle: yeah thats not a great layout. I usually put everything on /
atomicturtle: on the plus side, Ive seen worse
jflory7: This was how it was provided to me... is there a way I can adjust
         that? I presume putting it on / would let the hard drive not be
         limited to a particular directory?
atomicturtle: probably not
jflory7: So, I'm stuck with this? :/
atomicturtle: probably
atomicturtle: you could free up space
atomicturtle: boot it single user
atomicturtle: merge / and /var together
atomicturtle: you could also try parted, and make /var smaller an / larger,
              or try to merge them together with it
atomicturtle: it might be less work to back it up, and rekick it too
jflory7: So, if I were to back it up, adjust the hard drive partitioning, and
         then restoring the backup, that would be an effective way to solve
         the problem?
atomicturtle: it might be less work to reimage it, but yeah thats one way to
              do it

So, now, the advice I have been given is to restore my system to properly allocate hard drive space to all directories so I don't have to worry about this again. But I have no idea how to do this safely, securely, or reliably, and as mentioned previously, I am very, very new to this sort of stuff.

So, the question is: How do I reimage my hard drive to properly allocate the hard drive memory WITHOUT losing any data?

1 Answer 1

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As we have discussed in chat. Your primary problem is that you're running out of space on the volume that is mounted as your root.

Most of your available space is dedicated to another volume, which is mounted as /var.

With such a configuration is it usually assumed that large amounts of data are placed under the /var mount point and that the root volume only contains data relevant to the operating system (as far as possible).

Your primary goal right now should be to determine which folder is using up all your space.

As I indicated in our chat discussion, a great way to do so is to run du -h --max-depth=1 on the root of your system (cd /). You should then try to find the folders that use up the most space, while ignoring anything below /var (as that is mounted from the volume that has more than enough free space).

In chat, we determined that you had a Minecraft server running on your system. This server was using up 17GB of space in the /home/minecraft directory. Moving this folder to /var/opt was the first step to resolving your immediate issue.

To make this move possible, we first closed Minecraft as gracefully as possible in this context. We first determine if Minecraft-related processes were running using ps aux | grep minecraft.

We requested the running Minecraft process to exit using kill -s TERM to send the Minecraft process a TERM signal (which would cause it to gracefully terminate).

After that, we were able to move the problematic folder without fear of still having any open handles.

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