Recently, we kept receiving the following error message when trying to import a 1.5GB zexp file into Zope:

Error Value: [Errno 28] No space left on device

After finding a reference to this error in the following email:

http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2002-May/114219.html

we checked the size of our partitions and found that the /tmp directory was actually in the root partition:

Filesystem            Size        Used        Avail     Use%    Mounted on

/dev/hde3             1.8G       826M     866M      49%     /

tmpfs                    443M     0            443M         0%     /dev/shm

/dev/md2              74G        7.1G        63G        11%     /export

/dev/hde1             45M       9.4M        33M       23%     /boot

/dev/md0              5.5G      770M      4.5G        15%     /usr

/dev/md1              9.2G      393M      8.4G          5%     /var

and the root partition only had 866M of free space.  It appears that Zope is using the /tmp directory during the import process, which caused the “No space left on device” error. 

If you run into this problem, you can try the following work-around:

1. Create a “temporary” temp directory in a partition which has more free space, then the size of your zexp file, and set the sticky bit on it:

chmod 1777 /export/tmp

2.  Move /tmp to an alternate location:

mv /tmp /tmpOLD

3. Create a symlink from the new temp to /tmp:

ln -s /export/tmp /tmp

Since the /export partition on our machine had 63GB of space, Zope no longer gave us an error when we tried to import large files.

Links:

“Zope - Error Value: [Errno 28] No space left on device”  http://speeves.unt.edu/newindex/?p=130

“[Zope] import and setting tmp dir”  http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2002-May/114219.html