08-13-2004
Well, never say never and all, but I think it would be extremely unlikely that Unix would report the free space on a filesystem wrong. The only time I've ever seen that is when somebody has deleted a file but a process had a lock on the file. So some utilities would see that the space was available since the inodes were freed, but others wouldn't since the process still claimed to be using the space. As soon as the process died (or you rebooted if the process was a zombie) they got back in sync.
My guesses as to why you are seeing that problem are (in roughly the order of likelyhood I expect)
1. The utility is using way more disk than you expect while it is running. It could be a case where when the utility is done it cleans up most of the space it used, but while running it doesn't have enough for its temp files and so on.
2. Quotas are in place (agree with ZB on that)
3. If you're using a volume manager like Veritas, some kind of configuration problem means the filesystem is smaller than the volume or something like that, so when you check the device it has room but the filesystem itself has run out of space.
4. The minfree setting. ZB mentioned that too above, but I doubt it is the problem. The reason is, for Solaris which I know best at least, only root can see the actual size. If you are checking space as a normal user it only shows you what is available not including that "padding" from minfree. So when your users check and see free space that means the space is free below the minimum cap and thus that shouldn't be an issue. But if all else fails you could try reducing minfree and see if that helps.
Good luck.
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN
savecore
savecore(1M) System Administration Commands savecore(1M)
NAME
savecore - save a crash dump of the operating system
SYNOPSIS
/usr/bin/savecore [-Lvd] [-f dumpfile] [directory]
DESCRIPTION
The savecore utility saves a crash dump of the kernel (assuming that one was made) and writes a reboot message in the shutdown log. It is
invoked by the dumpadm service each time the system boots.
savecore saves the crash dump data in the file directory/vmcore.n and the kernel's namelist in directory/unix.n. The trailing .n in the
pathnames is replaced by a number which grows every time savecore is run in that directory.
Before writing out a crash dump, savecore reads a number from the file directory/minfree. This is the minimum number of kilobytes that must
remain free on the file system containing directory. If after saving the crash dump the file system containing directory would have less
free space the number of kilobytes specified in minfree, the crash dump is not saved. if the minfree file does not exist, savecore assumes
a minfree value of 1 megabyte.
The savecore utility also logs a reboot message using facility LOG_AUTH (see syslog(3C)). If the system crashed as a result of a panic,
savecore logs the panic string too.
OPTIONS
The following options are supported:
-d Disregard dump header valid flag. Force savecore to attempt to save a crash dump even if the header information stored on
the dump device indicates the dump has already been saved.
-f dumpfile Attempt to save a crash dump from the specified file instead of from the system's current dump device. This option may be
useful if the information stored on the dump device has been copied to an on-disk file by means of the dd(1M) command.
-L Save a crash dump of the live running Solaris system, without actually rebooting or altering the system in any way. This
option forces savecore to save a live snapshot of the system to the dump device, and then immediately to retrieve the data
and to write it out to a new set of crash dump files in the specified directory. Live system crash dumps can only be per-
formed if you have configured your system to have a dedicated dump device using dumpadm(1M).
savecore -L does not suspend the system, so the contents of memory continue to change while the dump is saved. This means
that live crash dumps are not fully self-consistent.
-v Verbose. Enables verbose error messages from savecore.
OPERANDS
The following operands are supported:
directory Save the crash dump files to the specified directory. If directory is not specified, savecore saves the crash dump
files to the default savecore directory, configured by dumpadm(1M).
FILES
directory/vmcore.n
directory/unix.n
directory/bounds
directory/minfree
/var/crash/'uname -n' default crash dump directory
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Availability |SUNWcsu |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
SEE ALSO
adb(1), mdb(1), svcs(1), dd(1M), dumpadm(1M), svcadm(1M), syslog(3C), attributes(5), smf(5)
NOTES
The system crash dump service is managed by the service management facility, smf(5), under the service identifier:
svc:/system/dumpadm:default
Administrative actions on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or requesting restart, can be performed using svcadm(1M). The ser-
vice's status can be queried using the svcs(1) command.
If the dump device is also being used as a swap device, you must run savecore very soon after booting, before the swap space containing the
crash dump is overwritten by programs currently running.
SunOS 5.10 25 Sep 2004 savecore(1M)