Filling / in novel ways

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

The last two days I've managed to fill up my root partition in two
different ways.  It is pleasing that the machine still runs very
responsively when this happens, and that I can diagnose and correct
the problem without resorting to rebooting, but it is annoying that my
only hint that something is wrong is that I cannot query my mail server.

The first thing that filled up my root partition was that my WD MyBook
got unplugged.  I usually have it mounted with NFS on /mnt/mybook - and
/mnt is on my root partition.  When the device got unplugged and my
scheduled backup ran, it tried to push 20Gb of backup data onto the
now-empty mount point, with only ~2Gb of free space.

I have since moved the mount point onto a partition with hundreds of Gbs
free, so that should not happen again.

This morning I found the same symptoms, but a different problem.  A long
time ago I aliased startx to do this: "startx > /var/log/x.log 2>&1" to
diagnose occasional problems with X configs.  I haven't needed this in
years, but this morning I found x.log was over 2Gb in size.  The culprit
(of course) is Flash - there were zillions (well, lots) of lines of
nswrapper output filling up the log.

Speaking of Flash, I have been systematically deleting all flash cookies
for a few months with this crontab:

0 * * * *       rm -r /home/$USER/.adobe; rm -r /home/$USER/.macromedia;

I have had no problems with stability (until perhaps last night - I must
investigate) and if I delete a browser cookie, it stays deleted, rather
than the zombie cookie behaviour that is increasingly common.
-- 

yours,

William

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