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Error Messages In WAM Or Glue Accounts

Here are the WAM error messages that you will receive:

New mail move failed: no space left on device

This is caused by a situation where your mail spool file (the unread mail):

is larger than the amount of free space available in your account. For example, if you're using 95% of your 100MB quota (about 95MB), which leaves you with 5% available, (about 5MB), and you have an unread mail file of greater than 5MB, most mail clients will fail trying to read the new (unread) mail.

When using Pine, it manifests itself with the error above. When using other offline mail clients like Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, it manifests itself by appearing that you no longer are receiving mail.

The reason for this is how most WAM and Glue accounts handle mail. When Pine, deals with your new mail, it copies the mail spool file:

and appends it to the file:

and then works on the  mbox  file. (This is to prevent corruption to your real incoming mail file while you're reading your mail and new mail comes in for you.) For a very short time during this copy process, both the mail spool file and the  mbox  file must exist at the same time; when the copy is finished the mail spool file is emptied (but the file remains). Therefore, for a brief time, the disk space usage is:

Once this copy process is completed, you'll only be using as much disk space as:

which will all be in your  mbox  file. If you don't have enough room under your quota to handle this copy procedure, you'll receive the (misleading) error "read only" message.

To check this, make sure that you are at the system prompt, and then type:

The results of the  quota  command should look similar to this:

  rac1:~: quota
  Volume Name               Quota    Used  %Used Partition 
  user.userid               100000   95120     95%
  rac1:~:

where userid is the login id of your account.

The total amount of disk space allowed on WAM and standard Glue accounts is 100MB; the above display shows it in Kilobytes (KB), so 100MB = 100000KB. Notice the "Used" and "%Used" values indicate how much physical space (in KB) you are using, and how much of a percentage of 100MB that space is. This is a normal situation where the user apparently has plenty of space. If, however, you use the  ls  command:

and look at the size of the mail spool file, you should see something like this:

  ls -l  /mail/userid/userid
-rw-------   1 70004    root   95367021 Dec  3 10:05 
/mail/userid/userid

The fifth field (in this case "95367021") is the size in bytes (characters) of the mail spool file (in this case, ~9.5MB). If this size is greater than the difference between the "Quota" and "Used" amounts from the  quota  command above, you will encounter the error above.

There is a program on the WAM and Glue systems to deal with this issue; it will append your mail spool file to your "mbox" file for you (mimicking the first step in a Pine session) without using your own file space. The command is:

If you are under quota, you will be able to get all your mail into the "mbox" file so that you can deal with it normally in Pine.

This is a one-time fix; you may still need to do something to get your disk space usage down or you'll keep having the problem, unless the mail spool file is of an unusually large size.

Checkpoint file failure: No space left on device

Sending error 452 userid@wam.umd.edu insufficient

If either or both of these messages appears when trying to send mail (or delete mail) from a WAM-based mail client program such as Pine, it may be due to a filled-to-capacity status for the /var partition on the RAC you are logged into. To test this, use the df command to check the size of the rac's partitions:

If the capacity figure is at 99 or 100% (in the example it is only 9%), this may be the problem. Therefore, please report

1. RAC number
2. Name of the full partition (/var, in this case)

to the Help Desk (301.405.1400 (Students) or 301.405.1500 (Faculty / Staff)) immediately. If you don't get a direct answer, leave a message.

Getting around the problem -- Since you are assigned a particular RAC by what is essentially a random process when you login into WAM, you can probably escape this problem until it is resolved by logging off and then logging back in. If the RAC number you get this time is different from the last, you'll have no similar problem unless THIS machine's /var partition is also full.

Resource temporarily unavailable writing logging article file -- throttling

This message, which may be encountered when trying to start a news reader, may take this sort of form:

This is the result of too many new, news items arriving at the news server when it has insufficient space for them. The volume of news is increasing rapidly, and keeping up with it can be difficult. If the expunging of news items when their expiration dates arrive isn't sufficient, manual intervention on the part of the WAM news staff is necessary. Please notify the Help Desk when you encounter this, leave a message if you do not receive a direct answer.