> > > I used Austin's command to determine that /var and /var/log were the two > largest users of hard drive space. I found 3 1GB log files (syslog, > kernel.log, and messages). I archived them and moved them into /home. > > I deleted those logs, but it wasn't until after a reboot that "df -h" > reported 3.9 GBs free in "/". >
On Linux, files are not truly "deleted" until all references to them are removed - which includes processes that have them open. These files would be open by the logging process, usually syslog. You can see this using something like lsof | grep syslog.conf. This is why the space was not freed until after rebooting. > On my own system and other commercial systems I'm use to having separate > /usr /var and /tmp dirs that way if those dirs fill up, you still have a > functional system while you sort out the disk space. > This would be a smart thing to do. > I guess what I didn't and still don't understand is that my friend's > system has a 400 GB drive and only 200 GB was used by /home by all 9.2 GB > of "/" was being used. > > So am I to understand that when you don't have a separate /usr /var/ and > /tmp dirs that all of those files are stored in "/" ? > Correct. > Also, what's interesting to me is that a non-custom partition table only > allocates 10 GB for everything that doesn't get stored in /home. Even on a > 430 GB hard drive. Am I understanding that correctly? > This is standard practice. I don't know why, but I see it everywhere and it bugs me as much as it does you. It does normally work - log files are not normally allowed to reach 1gb in size. They are supposed to be automatically archived and old ones deleted. You should probably look into why that's not happening. > Dumb question time. I don't suppose there's a way to symlink those dirs to > a space in the /home dir to avoid this problem in the future is there? > Yes, you can do this. Simply mv /var /home/var and then ln -s /home/var /var, and reboot. Even better would be to create a new partition in the empty (unused) space on the drive, and mount it on /var. You don't really need to do this for /usr or /tmp. -wes _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
