dnf update: Curl error (23), zsh failed and JetBrains Toolbox

One day my Fedora 38 system started to behave weirdly and the issues seemed related to some disk space problem.

Symptoms

• In zsh the error message “zsh write error” popped up randomly
• I could not update my repositories with dnf anymore:
• Errors during downloading metadata for repository 'fedora': - Curl error (23): Failed writing received data to disk/application for https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-39&arch=x86_64 [Failure writing output to destination]
• JetBrains Toolbox can successfully download updates but fails with “Package could not be extracted”

The things I checked: df -h: / seems fine, checked SMART all fine, checked any btrfs write errors OK, ran btrfs scrub, check journalctl and dmesg – no suspicious log entries

Google is not helpful: It is NO SPACE ISSUE. I checked the root disk already!

So I tried updating to Fedora 39 with some hacks and it worked fine. Weird… and the problems with JetBrains Toolbox, zsh, and dnf continued. dnf logs and zsh logs are not useful… but let’s check the Toolbox ones:

Executing /usr/bin/tar args: -xzf|/home/user/.local/share/JetBrains/Toolbox/download/26fea1a85-ideaIU-2023.2.4.tar.gz|-C|/tmp/232.10203.10-1093979452392200439|--strip-components=1
ERROR cher-worker-1 UnpackStateWorker         Failed to extract package. Process exit code: 2

Interesting tar fails, why should tar ever fail?

Let’s execute the command /usr/bin/tar … in zsh and it says “Not enough space”.

Now the realization with df: My /tmp is completely full. I double-checked with htop: 8G Swap used. But why?

Executing sudo du -xhd2 /tmp | sort -h finally shows the main problem:

836M    /tmp/233.8264.32--8272068605426155235/plugins
970M    /tmp/233.8264.32--8272068605426155235
1,3G    /tmp/232.10203.10-8651352671700199627/plugins
1,3G    /tmp/232.10203.8-2881103516914087057
1,4G    /tmp/233.10527.20-6057514370374517162/plugins
2,3G    /tmp/232.10203.10-8651352671700199627
2,6G    /tmp/233.10527.20-6057514370374517162
7,7G    /tmp

Some weird JetBrains Toolbox bugs seem to have used up all space on /tmp

Solution

A short “rm -r /tmp/232* && rm -r /tmp/233*” fixed all problems. Now I finally can update my Fedora without any workarounds, use zsh, and update all my IDEs with JetBrains Toolbox again.

How can we prevent it in the future? Lets only update/install one item in the Toolbox at a time: