Re: Root Partition Fills Up Completely After a Few Hours
On Thu, Dec 25, 2003 at 09:40:14PM -0800, Scarletdown wrote:
>
> Leaving the system unattended for a few hours, the / partition on my
> hard drive mysteriously fills up. When I open up KDiskfree, the
> partition in question shows as 100% used (red line all the way across.)
>
> This has happened twice now. The first time was after I went to bed
> last night. When I got up this morning, the drive was full. Then, it
> happened again while we were out doing Christmas dinner and movies. We
> left around 11:30 this morning, and when we returned just about a half
> hour ago, it was full again. Both times, I was able to clear it by
> logging out and back in again.
I saw a problem a bit like this once on a potato machine running kde.
I can't remember the details, but there was a huge file of zeros
in a .kde directory or similar.
I found it by doing du -sh * from the top directory and following
down through the biggest ones until I found the file. Finding the
file will give you some clue as to its origin. Someone might
suggest a find command to find all the really large files in one go.
> I'm suspecting that the culprit is ipmasq. I noticed that when I'm
> logged in to any text console, I occasionally get various firewall
> status lines, such as:
>
> IN= OUT=eth0 SRC=68.113.22.3 DST=68.111.54.95 LEN=40 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00
> TTL=64 ID=0 DF PROTO=TCP SP
>
> I'm guessing that this stuff is also going into some sort of temporary
> log file, which gets rather full after a few hours. What can I do to
> stop this? At the very least, I would like to set things up so ipmasq
> either creates no log file, or limits the size of the file to something
> reasonable. I'd also like to set it so those messages don't come up on
> the screen as well, as it gets rather annoying when I'm working from a
> console.
On my system they are logged into /var/log/kern.log*
I don't think they are likely to be the problem unless you either have
a tiny amount of free space or a _really_ busy site. These log files
normally amount to just a few megabytes.
There are a couple of ways to stop the logging to the console.
The only one I know off hand is a bit dirty - that is:
# echo "1 4 1 6" > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
to adjust the kernel logging levels. You could put it in a startup
script or just run it when you feel like it. Have a look at that file
to see what it is now.
There are much nicer ways though! It would be better for instance to
redirect all that stuff to one virtual console.
Patrick Lesslie
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