Linux Error: No Space Left on Device

On Linux machine, there could be several reasons for this error message appearing in some log file, or on the command line output while executing some command. Most of the time we immediately start checking if our file system has still sufficient space left, but file system space is not the problem most of the time. Following are a few of them I will be discussing.

1. Alert log shows ORA-27102 with "No space left on device" error message. Probably reason is that kernel parameters are not set properly to run Oracle database. To solve the problem, check the installation guide of particular Oracle version for appropriate kernel settings to run Oracle instance.
2. Memory and/or Swap space has depleted. "top" command of Linux will return total amount of RAM/SWAP and current usage.
3. Inodes of file system no more available. Look at the following output of "df -i"
   

   Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed      IFree          IUse%    Mounted on /dev/sda3            3923968  3923968 0                 100%         / tmpfs                 790326     279        790047       1%         /dev/shm /dev/sda1              51200      44        51156         1%        /boot

   If your file system contains a lot of files/folders which is eventually using all available inodes, you can start seeing error message "No space left on device". To solve this problem in this scenario, you would need to find out why this file system has this many file and why so many files/folders were created on this file system, and also deleting these files/folders.