Hi John. Hi everyone. I think that we are getting somewhere with this advice. We deleted all the content of /tmp without any consequences on reboot or on the lan. We could locate *.tmp but could not work out how to delete them safely as there were far too many to delete via 'rm' by hand and rm -r is scary. I can't see any evidence of our students being able to get anywhere above /home/students on the Samba share at the moment but please tell what the tell tale signs are. To reiterate our other thread, we'd love to be able to browse the w98 clients from the server but the smbmount, smbclient -L netbiosname and it's brousability passwords documentation we find even more inpenetrable than the setting up of our DNS zone files! Please don't get us wrong. Our network is saving us loads of time in lesson preparation as we can put all our plans on the share that the students are able to see us and we them. What a nonsense when I go to book a flight to London. My travel agent has 6 nodes under w2000, the printer doesn't print and the 17" screens are at 640 x 480. To add insult to.. . they are running the new Compaq ProLaint server enormous RAID box that they can't possibly need. They have 6 clients, we, 150. I sugggested that we swap machines. . . What a bore I am! Steve.
Hi We have the 3 standard partitions of / /boot and swap which 7.2 installed
by
default with the 2.4.4 4GB SuSE kernel. There is also a very small windows partition holding word and excel. Is it normal that we can't use the
server
as a normal machine because it is so slow with KDE up?
/var/adm and /var/log are huge and /tmp has loads of .wav files from cd burning. I'm not sure about the wisdomof deleting any of these aprt from
/tmp.
<snip>
This is probably the problem. One reason that experts recommend you partition your drive a bit more detailed is not only the speed aspect, but there are attacks based on causing your logs under /var to fill up your drive. Aside from attacks, when you have students "playing around" your Internet temp files and cache end up writing all over your drive. The result is a file system that is horribly fragmented on an OS know for being fragment resistant due in part to the partitioning scheme. Those little .gif files, the downloadable buttons, cookies, scripts and so forth have no need to intermingle with /usr/bin, /usr/X11R6, /etc and so on. Also, when you put your users on a separate partition it doesn't affect your overall system when they fill up their own personal disk space. Your /usr partion or kde installation will have as much free, unfragmented space as when you started.
So how to fix it? Start by copying those logs to a removable disk or deleting them if you don't need them (the old ones that is). Use the find command to find and delete all "core" files on your system. Delete the files in your Internet cache for all users and shrink the allowed cache size. Find and delete all files *.tmp. Find and delete all users no longer active on your system. These steps alone will probably free up a considerable amount. Later on you should consider repartitioning your hard drive when the time is more convenient.
Ciao,
John