/ full?

[Dustin Decker]

On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Jim Herrmann wrote:

> I'm trying to figure out why my root (/) partition, I have / and /home, shows 
> that it is full.  I have 5.3G allocated to /, and there's only 60M left!  
> Where did it all go.  According to properties in Konqueror, the /usr is only 
> 1.8G, which sounds about right for my install.  /Var is 58M, /lib is 58M, 
> /tmp about 1M, /opt is 73M,. /etc is 8.5M, other insignificant amounts.  
> Where did 2.5G of disk space go?  How can I find it and get it back?

Since you only have the / and /home partitions, I would suspect /var is 
the culprit.  It lives unter / in your current configuration...

Browse through /var/log for example - if you have been up for a while 
(this would be quite a while, months perhaps?) or have been under attack 
or experienced a high volume of logging, then /var/log may very well have 
a whole lot going on.

In addition - if you are using Red Hat and PostgreSQL or MySQL, databases 
will also live in the /var world.  If they're big, that will be eating up 
room as well.  I hope this helps out.

For those who are concerned about experiencing this behavior themselves in 
the future, it's a good idea to keep /var on a separate partition.  It 
would help Jim in this current circumstance as well since utilities such 
as df will make reports based on partition, as will du unless you get more 
specific at the command line.  It can make troubleshooting this difficult.

Dustin

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