Hello,

I have a question to about adding a new HDD under Linux. I did buy a 60GB IDE HDD to have more disc space on my webserver. At the moment there are only 3GB. After installing the disc with our company developer I have the following problem:

If I look with the Windows Explorer on the first 3GB HDD on a file with the size of 1kb the size on the disk is 64kb.

If I look now on the second HDD with 60GB disk space, each file use 1MB on the disc even if the file is only 1kb.

I found some information in the web about this inodes setting for the mke2fs command. After that we did create the file system again and changed the parameter from 4096 to 1024.

But the usage of the disc space is the same. Each file use minimum 1MB disc space...

Does somebody know how to solve this problem? Or is this a Linux limitation because of the big disc size?

Kernel Version is 2.2.14
thanks to make my Linux webserver more efficient

Since you said your using Windows Explorer, I asume you are using Samba. Samba reports huge block sizes to Windows, giving off false "disk space used" readings. Each file isn't really taking up 64k.

I'm not sure off hand how to check this under Linux though.

Try the "df" command in linux and see how much disk space it thinks is free. Go by this reading instead of samba... I thought filesystems had progressed passed the needing-to-be-small-for-smaller-blocks thing years ago? As far as I knew at the time that was only a windows problem...

Matthew

Just to expound on the advice other people gave, there are two limiting factors on an ext2 filesystem (which are the same as for most Unix filesystems).

First, there's the actual space available on the filesystem. Each file takes up pretty much exactly how much space it needs, and no more (actually, that's not true, as there is, on average, one half a block (where a block can be 1, 2, or 4kB) wasted per file, but that's not really all that significant). Also note that there is some overhead for the filesystem itself, and there is also some space, usually 5%, reserved for the superuser, to prevent the filesystem from becoming completely full. You might want to change that using tunefs if it's purely a data (and no logs) filesystem.

The other limiting factor is the number of inodes available. This is set at filesystem creation time and cannot be changed after the fact. Each distinct file requires one inode, and, if you run out, no more files can be created, no matter how much actual disk space you have left. By default, mke2fs creates one inode per 4kB. This means that as long as the average size of the files is 4kB or more, you'll be okay. If it's less, you'll run out of inodes before you run out of space. But having more inodes increases the filesystem overhead I mentioned above, so don't go overboard. You can see the number of inodes used and available with the ``df -i'' command.

thanks a lot to all for explaining that Linux stuff!

bye

Hello,

My questions concerning adding a new HDD was, because I am working to build up an new Linux webserver for my homepage. The second disk is working fine. Thanks for the help.

I am using dnsart.com for my Domain Name Service with dynamic IP address over DSL.

At the moment I have running also a Windows machine using a client program for automatic updating of my address when it changes.

But this is not really efficient. The idea is to eliminate this Billy machine for this automatic update. There is also a Perl script to run it under my Linux (Crontab) webserver. To get it run I need to install some additional modules like Crypt::PasswdMD5.

Everything works fine to get this modules, but on the end I get everytime an "Oops, make had returned bad status" error.

I did enable the debug mode from cpan and attached the a log file.

Can somebody tell me please, what I am doing wrong?

Thanks a lot in advance...

It's failing at ``Writing Makefile for Crypt::PasswdMD5'', which sounds like a permissions problem. Check that everything under /root/.cpan/ is owned by the appropriate person, especially /root/.cpan/build and /root/.cpan/build/Crypt-PasswdMD5-1.2. Then try again. If all else fails, blow away the /root/.cpan directory altogether and retry.

BTW, your filesystem isn't full, is it?

Hello Bitt,

Thanks for your answer...I did doublecheck the permission stuff. I am logged in as "root" and I changed all full permissions to root with chmod 755 and chown -R root.root. I got the same error also with deleting the .cpan directory. Then I did try to install the modules manually with
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test

in this directories...It doesn't work too. Must be there somewhere on my HDD an application calling "make"? Because I haven't this file? How or where can I get it, if I need it?

The disc usage is 2%.

Sorry for this stupid questions, but I am trying to learn more about Linux....

Thanks

Yes. You absolutely need make. That's your problem.

I assumed that the problem was in creating the Makefile, but it was in the step directly after that, where it is trying to run make and failing.