On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 14:09 -0600, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
On 15/03/06 03:23, lerninlinux@comcast.net wrote:
This is going to be a nearly stupid question (as it would be more stupid not to ask it, then overlook something). I have never completely filled up a drive before, and never thought I would. I had been leaving my system on, and hooked to an older battery backup. I talked to a neighbor, and it appears someone thought they could outrun the police, and took out power in my area, intermitantly, a couple weeks back. Due to work I am just now getting to my pc, as I found out my batteries, in the backup had gone bad, so the computer, kept restarting, and it appears filled up with logs. As I have never had a FULL drive before: 1. Do I have to use a bootable disto to delete stuff, since no room left (unsure if the marking of delete, takes up space) 2. can you recommend other areas to look and clean things up why I am at it. 3. Any other helpfull sugestions (aka not the known and smart alec, get a new battery backup. I am planning that)
Thanks
Specs not listed, as I didn't think they were necassary in this instance.
Boot into the rescue system on the installation CD/DVD and mount the partition on some working directory, say /mnt. All the major log files are in /var/log, and these are likely the ones that have caused the drive to become filled. So cd /mnt/var/log, then ls -l to see what you are facing. (If you have /var on its own partition, then mount that one, and cd /mnt/log). Hopefully there will be enough old logs lying around that you don't need anymore, and can just delete these. If push comes to shove, you can probably delete messages, firewall, and warn as well,
Better bet is to either delete some of the content from these files or if you don't care use
/mnt/var/log/messages
and do the same for the other files as well. If you just delete the files all logging will stop to those files (AFAIK).
though first check other areas (see below) if you don't want to lose the current log files.
Other places that can contain a lot of old files you don't need are: /var/adm and /var/lib (particularly the Yast-maintained areas), as well as /tmp.
/tmp is a good place to free up some space immediately. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998