ORA-09817: Write to audit file failed.

While trying to connect to our 11gR2 Oracle database this morning I got the
ORA-09817: Write to audit file failed. error message.

bash-3.2$ sqlplus / as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Thu Jul 14 10:29:19 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved. ERROR: ORA-09817: Write to audit file failed. IBM AIX RISC System/6000 Error: 28: No space left on device Additional information: 12 ORA-09945: Unable to initialize the audit trail file IBM AIX RISC System/6000 Error: 28: No space left on device Enter user-name:

On doing a "df -m" at I noticed that the / had run out of space. It's on / that I had our ORACLE_HOME, so I seemed that that might have caused the problem.

$ df -m Filesystem MB blocks Free %Used Iused %Iused Mounted on /dev/hd4 25600.00 0.00 100% 70464 95% /

I increased the size of / from 25G to 50G by doing the following:

isvp14_ora> chfs -a size=50G / Filesystem size changed to 104857600 isvp14_ora> df -m Filesystem MB blocks Free %Used Iused %Iused Mounted on /dev/hd4 51200.00 25596.05 51% 70465 2% /

Now, I tried to connect to the database again, and everything worked fine.

bash-3.2$ sqlplus / as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Thu Jul 14 10:34:32 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production With the Partitioning, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options SQL>