> it was at 100%. The only way I could get anywhere was to go thru
> failsafe and login as root in text mode. And yes, I was in a panic. What
> I found was 8 files in /var/log, which when deleted, took me from 100%

Well, like I said, there could be really big logfiles. Your partition is
big enough that those files must have been several hundred megs in order
to have filled up your root partition. All the better to have /var off by
itself on another partitiion somewhere. Normally, of course, that shouldn't
happen; something must have caused a runaway log. For 'regular' workstations
those logs should be only a few megs apiece.

About failsafe in particular: I don't pretty much like Mandrake's idea of
graphical login, which even goes as far to elide the need for passwords at
times. To each their own, but I prefer actually having to login at a login:
prompt. And, I've always booted up in console mode, using startx to get
to X.

> StarOffice may be what created this problem. Those 8 log files were
> listed as one of the users. He only uses LM when he needs to write a
> report or something, and that's pretty limited. 

That's strange - logs should be written by the logging softare - those
are owned by root - at least mine are. But that corrupt Staroffice 6
bin turned out to be the culprit. I figured something was wrong when
the system was just churning the disk for twenty minutes - and I had a
log file that was several hundred megabytes long.

> Why did you switch from redhat? Just curious.

Well, after using 6.0 something for a while, things became a bit on the
unruly side - my system had grown to a hodgepodge of clutter, stuff from
other places installed in there. Besides, I was running out of room on 
my old 1.6 gig drive, so after getting a new 30gig one I figured it was 
again the time to reinstall. (I faced a similar situation several years
ago using a similarly hodgepodged system that was running Slackware.) I 
figured Mandrake was worth a try, so I grabbed it off an ftp mirror - and
at that time, I had just gotten DSL, which was another reason to try and
get something really really big from the .net  :).


And for what it's worth - I don't know if you're running with ext2 or
reiserfs, but another way to add a lot of extra space is to switch to
reiserfs. I didn't expect it at all, but I converted some of my filesystems
over to reiserfs earlier today, and /home, which was a 5gig filesystem and
was almost full, now has >900 megs free. The same is true for /usr/local,
another 5 gig partition. It wasn't as full as /home, but there's a lot more
room there now. I figure that's due to not needing inodes and such. Probably
though there's got to be some reserved room for the journal - what happens
when that gets full?

> Thanks

you're welcome :)

> Lori



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