rambling notes on a full /

Alex Gabriel alexgabriel-Nmj6Sl6vboSovDFt+AQlJdBPR1lH4CV8 at public.gmane.org
Tue Mar 13 17:57:35 UTC 2012


The first culprit I'd examine would have been the /tmp directory, if it was off /.

I've seen that fill up very quickly, especially with applications that cause core dumps to be saved.
------Original Message------
From: D. Hugh Redelmeier
Sender: owner-tlug at ss.org
To: Toronto Linux Users Group
ReplyTo: tlug at ss.org
Subject: [TLUG]: rambling notes on a full /
Sent: Mar 13, 2012 1:32 PM

/ filled up on one of my Mythbuntu servers.  This isn't good because it's 
hard to know what damage this caused: any logging writes likely failed.  

The original symptom that I noted was that mythweb could not find any of 
the recordings I'd made (note: those recordings are not on /) (it could 
find the metadata -- it knew what was recorded).  The symptom was hard to 
relate to the disease.  This is actually common for full filesystems: odd 
symptoms show up that don't directly suggest the, uh, root of the problem.

I made some room on / and ignored the as-yet-undetected consequences.

I figured that the reason the disk filled up is that I never removed old 
kernels so eventually there were enough to fill up /.  / is allocated 15G.  
After deleting all but two kernels and rebooting, I have 5.8G free.  So 
those kernels are fat!

Synaptic says:

on disk size    download size          name
 76.2 MB            10 MB              linux-headers
128 MB              31 MB              linux-image

Each package is amazingly more compact than the installed size.

Each kernel version costs about 200 MB.  I removed 5.  I should have 
recovered about 1 GB.  So how come I got 5.8 GB back?  Something doesn't 
add up.

To investigate, I removed a kernel package on another Mythbuntu server 
(same release and architecture).  According to df, I saved 221 MB.  So 
synaptic's estimate was off by less than 10%.

That leaves a mystery: why, then, was / full?  Oh well.  Perhaps the 
reboot fixed everything.
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