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Running out of space on RIO

While attempting to deploy we got the following error:

> A failure occurred while executing edu.wpi.first.deployutils.deploy.artifact.ArtifactDeployWorker
   > SFTP error (SSH_FX_FAILURE): Failure

We put the error into google and found a stack overflow post which suggested that we were running out of space. We SSH'd into the RIO using ssh admin@10.17.47.2 where the ip address is the one found in driver station.

Verifying the issue

In order to validate the cause of our issue as the RIO being out of space, we ran the command df -h to show the space available.

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
ubi1:rootfs             386.3M    386.3M         0 100% /
devtmpfs                121.6M         0    121.6M   0% /dev
tmpfs                   122.1M    128.0K    122.0M   0% /run
tmpfs                    63.5M     76.0K     63.4M   0% /var/volatile
ubi0:bootfs              49.0M     45.8M      3.2M  94% /boot
ubi0:config               2.0M    112.0K      1.7M   6% /etc/natinst/share
Based on the output, we can see this is true, as the ubi1:rootfs filesystem has no available space. We also noted that this is an extremely small amount of space total.

Finding the space

We next used pwd to show what directory we were in on the RIO. SSH defaults to the user we logged in as which is /home/admin We then used ls /home to check what directories where available before using the cd command to swap to the /home directory.

Once in the /home directory we used the ls command again to see the available directories, with ours showing:

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home# ls
admin/   lvuser/  root@    webserv/

The lvuser (LabView User) is the user account which runs the robot code. We ran cd lvuser/ to get into that user's directory and once in we ran ls again to show the contents of the directory.

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home/lvuser# ls
Downloads.jar*             README_File_Paths.txt@     frc_install/               robotCommand*
FRC_UserProgram.log@       SweeveProjects.jar*        logs/                      robotDebugCommand*
IsabelleTest.jar*          deploy/                    natinst/                   sweeve gen.jar
PhoenixDiagnosticsProgram* frc/                       networktables.json

From there we used ls -alh to get the list of files and folders inside /home/lvuser/ along with the sizes of each file or folder.

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home/lvuser# ls -alh
total 30364
drwxrwsr-x    7 lvuser   ni          1.4K Dec 11 19:36 ./
drwxr-xr-x    5 admin    administ     416 Jan  2  2025 ../
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni           389 Sep  9  2024 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni           241 Sep  9  2024 .profile
-rwxr-xr-x    1 lvuser   ni          6.8M Dec  4 20:35 Downloads.jar*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 lvuser   ni            42 Jan  2  2025 FRC_UserProgram.log -> /var/local/natinst/log/FRC_UserProgram.log
-rwxr-xr-x    1 lvuser   ni          6.8M Nov 26 14:51 IsabelleTest.jar*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 lvuser   ni          4.6M Nov 26 14:07 PhoenixDiagnosticsProgram*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 admin    ni            22 Jan 20  2023 README_File_Paths.txt -> /README_File_Paths.txt
-rwxr-xr-x    1 lvuser   ni          6.8M Dec  4 19:56 SweeveProjects.jar*
drwxr-sr-x    2 admin    ni           232 Nov 26 14:39 deploy/
drwxr-xr-x    4 lvuser   ni           304 Jan  2  2025 frc/
drwxrwsr-x    2 lvuser   ni           160 Dec 18  2024 frc_install/
drwxr-sr-x    2 lvuser   ni           952 Dec  4 19:56 logs/
drwxrwxr-x    4 lvuser   ni           296 Dec 18  2024 natinst/
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni             3 Nov 26 14:40 networktables.json
-rwxr-xr-x    1 lvuser   ni           170 Dec 11 19:48 robotCommand*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 lvuser   ni            39 Nov 26 14:07 robotDebugCommand*
-rw-r--r--    1 admin    ni          4.6M Dec 11 19:48 sweeve gen.jar

Looking at the files and folders shown we found the logs/ directory which ended up having a large number of files with the .hoot extension, most of which were over 2M as shown here:

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home/lvuser/logs# ls -alh
total 169084
drwxr-sr-x    2 lvuser   ni           952 Dec  4 19:56 ./
drwxrwsr-x    7 lvuser   ni          1.4K Dec 11 19:36 ../
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni         88.3M Dec  4 19:56 rio_1969-12-31_19-06-28.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni          9.6M Nov 26 14:44 rio_2025-11-26_14-40-17.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni          1.8M Nov 26 14:45 rio_2025-11-26_14-44-21.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni          7.7M Nov 26 14:48 rio_2025-11-26_14-45-15.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni          2.2M Nov 26 14:49 rio_2025-11-26_14-48-38.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni          3.5M Nov 26 14:51 rio_2025-11-26_14-49-44.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni          2.1M Nov 26 14:52 rio_2025-11-26_14-51-15.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni         12.1M Nov 26 14:56 rio_2025-11-26_14-52-17.hoot
-rw-r--r--    1 lvuser   ni         37.8M Dec  4 20:12 rio_2025-12-04_19-56-49.hoot

Cleaning up the found large files

To clean out the logs and get the space needed we used rm rio_* which removes all of the files that start with rio_ without having to type the unique character strings. The same logs folder after using rm rio_* is shown here:

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home/lvuser/logs# ls -alh
total 0
drwxr-sr-x    2 lvuser   ni           160 Dec 11 19:58 ./
drwxrwsr-x    7 lvuser   ni          1.4K Dec 11 19:36 ../

Validation

After doing that the RIO should have plenty of space to deploy robot code again. We can verify that what we did cleaned up space, by again running the df -h command from earlier:

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home/lvuser/logs# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
ubi1:rootfs             386.3M    249.1M    132.5M  65% /
devtmpfs                121.6M         0    121.6M   0% /dev
tmpfs                   122.1M    128.0K    122.0M   0% /run
tmpfs                    63.5M     76.0K     63.4M   0% /var/volatile
ubi0:bootfs              49.0M     45.8M      3.2M  94% /boot
ubi0:config               2.0M    112.0K      1.7M   6% /etc/natinst/share

To logout use exit which should show:

admin@roboRIO-1747-FRC:/home/lvuser/logs# exit
logout
Connection to 10.17.47.2 closed.