[mdlug] WTF /var/log

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2011-06-30 at 23:55 -0400, Robert Jim Fulner wrote:
> I booted into GNOME today after I had had a bunch of weird things going 
> on in LXDE were I normally reside. (Like being told I had 36GB of free 
> space, and also being told there was not enough room to save the word 
> processing document I was writing).
> In GNOME I was greated with a message informaing me i had 0 bytes of 
> space left. WTF, I have like nothing on this machine, I'm not a 
> music/video guy...
> Run the Disk Use Analyser as requested, and /var/log is using up 98% of 
> the space on my system.

Yep; a good reason to have /var/log as its own volume.  Even on a
desktop/laptop system.  This is the most common problem I see regarding
omg-my-disk-is-full.

> The only thing I can think that this may have to do with is that after 
> Penguincon I got really excited about a few of the panels I went to and 
> installed Drupal6 without really knowing what I was doing and realizing 
> later that's not really approiate for my home machine, and is intended 
> to be on the webserver itself. So I'm not using any of that bolonga, but 
> I'm gonna guess that's what's eating my resources
> Is my conjecture accurate? What's the best way to go from here to get 
> useable space back without screwing up my system in the process.

Go to /var/log and do an 'du -ks * | sort -n' to see what is taking up
the space.  You probably have some service installed that didn't define
a log rotation rule [or your log rotation just isn't working].