Yesterday I thought I’d try running my loading scripts on my home machine because it’s so much faster than my colo box. And it was running faster, and had gotten further than the still running script on my colo box when I got hoist by my own petard. I like to partition my systems up with different sized partitions for different major directories, and unfortunately, on this home machine, I only gave 100Mb for /tmp, not realizing that MySQL uses a temporary directory when you’re doing a long transaction. According to munin, the script filled up /tmp and died just a few minutes before I woke up this morning. So I’ve gone into /etc/mysql/my.cnf, changed the temporary directory to /var/tmp, and restarted it. /var/tmp has 7.6Gb free, so it should be safe.