you were both right - I deleted files and voila emails were working again, and
mysteriously the ureadahead entry disappeared when I ran -df as well.
now done to a much healthier 18% of disk usage
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda 10321208 1697448 8099472 18% /
none 293304 120 293184 1% /dev
none 297888 0 297888 0% /dev/shm
none 297888 72 297816 1% /var/run
none 297888 0 297888 0% /var/lock
none 297888 0 297888 0% /lib/init/rw
thanks very much for your help
Andrew
On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 01:50:53PM +0000, Andy Bennett wrote:
Your root partition is full and you don't appear
to have a separate one
for the spools.
You may find that other things like mailboxes, logs and databases files
have all been unexpectedly truncated. Free up some space, check
everything carefully and be prepared to restore things from backups
where daemons have gotten into a fix before writing out their in memory
data.
And maybe also consider asking for a disk space nagios alert (will
require either allowing check by ssh, running nrpe or snmpd).
Cheers,
Andy