Re: Files piling up in /var/* directories
On Saturday 11 March 2006 06:52, Charles wrote:
>I've noticed that I have files piling up in /var/cache, /var/log, and
>/var/lib. These three folders now have 100 mb of files in them.
>
>
>Which of these must be present for the machine to run? This is (at
> the moment) a home machine; I don't *need* the log files, but I
> don't know what happens if I just delete the files in these three
> directories.
That will eat your lunch. If logrotate is properly setup, those files
will not grow beyond what they are as the old ones will be expunged
when they are no longer of forensic value, typically 5 weeks total
lifetime. /var/cache is the only one that will grow because your
package manager typically keeps a copy of what it has downloaded and
upgraded in its original download form. Your package manager should
have a command to flush that if your /var is getting close to capacity.
With disc space a commodity thing, a 500 meg /var partition is
unimaginable today, my /var/cache alone is 1,273,796 whatevers in du's
default format. Which is not a big deal since /var is on /dev/hdd, a
15GB partition on a 200GB drive. 4GB swap is there, and the rest is
amanda vtapes for backups. This does point out one given, that /var is
not on the main drive, so I stand a little better chance of having some
forensics available should the main drive upchuck and go read-only on
me, which did happen once long ago.
--
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
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