ORA-09817: Write to audit file failed Linux Error: 28: No space left on device

Users are reporting that they can’t connect to a database. You log on to the database server, attempt to connect to SQL*Plus, and receive this error:
ORA-09817: Write to audit file failed.
Linux Error: 28: No space left on device
Additional information: 12

You want to quickly determine if a mount point is full and where the largest files are within this mount point.

To resove this, use the df command to identify disk space issues. This example uses the -
h to format the output so that space is reported in megabytes or gigabytes:

$ df –h

Here is some sample output:

The prior output indicates that the root (/) file system is full on this server. In this situation, once a full mount point is identified, then use the find command to locate the largest files contained in a directory structure. This example navigates to the ORACLE_HOME directory and then connects the find, ls, sort, and head commands to identify the largest largest top 10 files beneath that directory:

$ cd $ORACLE_HOME

$ find . -ls | sort -nrk7 | head -10

If you have a full mount point, also consider looking for the following types of files that can be moved or removed:

• Deleting database trace files

• Removing large Oracle Net log files

• Moving, compressing, or deleting old archive redo log files

• Removing old installation files or binaries

• If you have datafiles with ample free space, consider resizing them to smaller sizes

Another way to identify where the disk space is being used is to find the largest space-consuming directories beneath a given directory. This example combines the du, sort, and head commands to show the ten largest directories beneath the current working directory:

$ du -S . | sort -nr | head -10

The prior command is particularly useful for identifying a directory that might not necessarily have large files in it, but lots of small files consuming space (like trace files).