missing disk space
I have several servers running on woody with a 2.4.18 kernel using ext2
file systems (yes, I know its old.) Until recently, they've been
extremely stable. Then I found that the /var partition on one of them
was completely full. I managed to free up about 860 MB while I went
looking for the cause.
The first thing I found was that df and du did not even come close to
agreeing. Here is the most recent:
home:~# df -h /var
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 10G 8.8G 716M 93% /var
home:~# du -hs /var
120M /var
I also noticed that the amount of free space according to df was
steadily decreasing, but the du results stayed the same. The rate is not
consistent (it averages to about 1 or 2MB per hour) but the drain is
constant.
At the time I discovered this, the server was running sendmail for
backup mx with milter-greylist. It also was serving as a file server
(with nfs, /var was not exported), a mysql server (databases are not on
the /var partition) and a dns server (bind9). I moved the backup mx to
another server and shut down the mail stuff. Then I commented out every
nonessential cron job I could find (like mail queue ageing) and
restarted as many services as I could (like syslog and ntp). Nothing
seems to have helped. My other servers are having no problem.
I know I can probably just unmount, run e2fsck and get the space back.
But I would like to know what the problem is first. Has anyone else seen
something like this? All other mentions I found in google concerned
single incidents and usually involved a power outage. I could not find a
mention of an ongoing "disk leak".
--
Peter A. Dumpert
Innovative Computer Services, LLC
The Diamond Standard of Internet Business
P: 732-683-0092 x 102 F: 732-577-9390
http://innovativebusiness.net/
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