NoMachine Disk Quota Exceeded

When connecting to the CADE machines with NoMachine, the most common error a user may receive is “Disk Quota Exceeded”. This message occurs when a user has used up the allotted space in their home directory (currently 16GB).

To fix this, you’ll need to grab an SSH session to a lab machine and delete some data that way.

Using Windows Powershell or a Mac Terminal, run “ssh username@lab1-1.eng.utah.edu”
Then run “du -xhad1 | sort -hr | head -n 20”
This will summarize your disk usage with depth=1. This will take a few minutes. Be patient!

For example:

  [user@lab1-1 ~]$ du -xhad1 ~ | sort -hr | head -n 10
  16.0G /home/user
  13.4G /home/user/Downloads
  1014M /home/user/cs4200
  468M /home/user/eclipse-workspace
  190M /home/user/.mozilla
  162M /home/user/.eclipse
  128M /home/user/.nx
  82M /home/user/PycharmProjects
  44M /home/user/Videos
  38M /home/user/Pictures

Here we can see that we’re using 16.0GB of space total. That’s our entire quota. Of the 16.0G, 13.4G is from the Downloads directory.

Let’s see what’s using the space in our Downloads directory.

 [user@lab1-1 ~]$ du -xhad1 ~/Downloads | sort -hr | head -n 10
  11G /home/user/Downloads/dataset.zip
  2.4G /home/user/Downloads/DogVideo.mp4
  12M /home/user/Downloads/Never Gonna Give You Up.mp3

Ah! that dataset we downloaded last semester is still in our Downloads directory. Let’s delete it.

 [user@lab1-1 ~]$ rm /home/user/Downloads/dataset.zip

If you need to delete a directory (and all contents within), add the recursive and force options.

 [user@lab1-1 ~]$ rm -rf /home/user/cs4200

You may also need to purge your NoMachine cache, as it may have gotten corrupted if NoMachine ran out of space while running.

 [user@lab1-1 ~]$ rm -rf /home/user/.nx