Hard drive filling up automatically

[Fourthbean]

I have a knoppmyth box set up for recording off of the sattelite. It is running knoppix as the base operating system.

On my first install the log files did not auto rotate so I created a partition just for them so that the whole system didn't shut down when the log files filled up.

Now after 6 months or so of running the main partition is filling up again, I can't find what is being filled. My partitions are like so:

/dev/hda1 2392056 2264588 5956 100% /
/dev/hda3 33784544 135628 31932748 1% /cache
/dev/hda4 2682828 94104 2452444 4% /var/log
/dev/hdb1 153834852 43023364 102997072 30% /storage


hda1 is the partition I am worried about, as the whole machine comes to a halt when it gets full.

Do any of you have some tips that could tell me what is being written there all the time so I can stop it or devert it?

Thank you for your help.

Fourthbean

[anomie]

A good first step would be to figure out what is taking up the brunt of the space. What does the following command show you:

# du -k /* | sort -nr | head

[Fourthbean]

Thanks for the quick reply, that is exactly what I thought the first step was. But not knowing many linux commands I didn't know which to use!

Here is the output, I also went into usr and did a form of the command there.

root@mythtv:/# du -k /* | sort -nr | head
42990556        /storage
1767116 /usr
533140  /usr/src
526282  /proc
454388  /usr/share
405192  /usr/lib
267280  /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.13.2-chw-3
197340  /var
117336  /usr/share/doc
111636  /var/lib
root@mythtv:/# cd /usr
root@mythtv:/usr# du -k * | sort -nr | head
533140  src
454388  share
405192  lib
267280  src/kernel-source-2.6.13.2-chw-3
117336  share/doc
106252  src/kernel-source-2.6.13.2-chw-3/drivers
99632   src/mythtv
93304   src/ffmpeg
93028   bin
85020   X11R6
root@mythtv:/usr#

Not sure if that actually gives anything definite, seems like it is pretty spread out in space usage.

[anomie]

seems like it is pretty spread out in space usage.

I agree with that assessment.

If I'm reading everything correctly, you have a 2.28GB partition that gets mounted to /. Of that, 2.16GB is already in use!

On that same partition, /usr is taking up 1.68GB. That doesn't seem unusual to me. There may be ways to trim some fat off /usr, but I don't know enough about your distro to be able to comment on that.

So, I'll give you the answer you probably do not want to hear: The real fix may be to allocate more space for your / filesystem. Since you don't have a separate partition for /usr, I'd recommend allocating at least 6GB for / (to give you some room to grow).

Maybe someone else has some less painful ideas for you. Good luck.

[bigtomrodney]

So your root is only just over two gigabytes? That can be quite tight. The first thing to do is empty anything old from /tmp, but beyond that you are working with limited space so you might consider removing any non-necessary apps. Alternatively if you have a particular directory causing trouble you could steal back ~1.5GB from the /var/log partition and mount the troublesome directory there. What is cache use for? Is it for MythTV, as it doesn't seem to contain much.

[Fourthbean]

I guess my mistake in the first place was the small root partition .

I moved the /var/log partition to /var to free up some space there. I guess I just figured since I didn't do anything to the root partition and it was growing making the partition bigger would be a temporary fix. Maybe the temp fix will last a few years though .

Ha ha, I just redid the partition. It didn't reboot correctly so I am going to have to make a trip to the den and turn the tv on to see what went wrong.


The cache partition is for mythtv to store currently watching tv so you can rewind/fast forward. What's funny is that we don't watch tv anymore with it, we just watch the recorded shows . Hopefully this fix will work for another year before I need to reinstall to get new features or something.

You guys are great

[Fourthbean]

Got it booted, it was just complaining about booting 38 times without a fsck.

Here is what df -h looks like now.

/dev/hda1 2.3G 1.9G 278M 88% /
/dev/hda3 33G 133M 31G 1% /cache
/dev/hda4 2.6G 226M 2.3G 10% /var
/dev/hdb1 147G 42G 99G 30% /storage


I'll see how long this lasts and steal some of the /cache if needed later on if it continues to fill up.

[bigtomrodney]

Sweet. You can set up some cool jobs for removing or rotating logs if you need. I know SUSE comes with them by default so if you want I can try poach some for you.

[Fourthbean]

Are there any logs other than what is in /var/log? I used the simplistic way by giving the log's their own partition, but if there are other logs I would be interested in a way to manage them.

[bigtomrodney]

They are pretty much in there unless something is specifically directed elsewhere. You will find user config files and caches turning up in the home directory. For example I have a large musc collection so my amarok config/cache is pretty huge.

I was just looking here, the command is logrotate, it is a RedHat tool but I'm sure it has been ported to Debian.