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vol0 inode usage unexpected high and growing permanently

  1. Last updated
    Feb 10, 2025
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Category:
ontap-9
Specialty:
CORE
Last Updated:
2/10/2025, 1:14:07 PM

Applies to

  • ONTAP 9.13.1+ without fix for CONTAP-115704.
  • SSH public key authentication in use, likely with very frequent SSH sessions from automation scripts.
  • Node root volume (vol0) inode exhaustion or permanent increase.
  • Node /tmp/ directory capacity exhaustion.

Issue

  • High inode count caused by files matching  /mroot/etc/cluster_config/vserver/.vserver_*/config/auth.[0-9,a-z,A-Z]+ .
  • CONTAP-115704 (legacy id 1595173) lists different symptoms, one of them is continuous increase of vol0 inode usage.
  • In the following example, node MyCluster-02 is not affected (was recently cleaned up) but node MyCluster-01 is heavily affected with >12 million inodes:

MyCluster::*> node run -node * -command df -i vol0
2 entries were acted on.

Node: MyCluster-01
Filesystem               iused      ifree  %iused  Mounted on
/vol/vol0/            12330575    8920551     58%  /vol/vol0/

Node: MyCluster-02
Filesystem               iused      ifree  %iused  Mounted on
/vol/vol0/              294533   20956593      1%  /vol/vol0/

Note: Usually both nodes are affected, the magnitude depends majorly  on LIF distribution across nodes for LIFs that are used for SSH access.

  • Unexpected high inode count in root volume, can lead to unforseeable issues in different subsystems and processes.

 

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