[mdlug] WTF /var/log

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 13:58 -0400, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> 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.
> This is why /var belongs on its own filesystem.
> Make it about 4GB - 10GB

+1 (although I usually separate it at /var/log;  and on printer servers
you carve our /var/spool/cups as well).  In the days now when everyone
should be using LVM there is little cost to this.  Make your hard drive
a PV then create LVs [don't use actual "partitioning"]  just as big as
you need them and leave the rest of the space unused.  You can grow the
LVs you need too on-the-fly so nobody needs to wild-???-guess about what
file-system size allocation is appropriate anymore.

Use the tools!

> > 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.
> su to root, and then
> ls -al /var/log
> this  will give you file sizes in bites.

But not of subdirectories; of which there are many in a typical /var/log

"sudo du -ks /var/log/* | sort -n"