Avail disk space always goes to zero....

rhbgames · 02-14-2006, 06:56 PM

I am running SuSE 9.0 and have a little UNIX experience from long long ago. Today I found that my system was out of space. The drive is small, so no surprise. I deleted 100MB and ten minutes later out of space. I keep deleting and within minutes the gains are gone. Furthermore, I can't find where the space is going - tried find, du, df but still no clue.

Now the big mystery is that as root, I did a du -s * at the top level directory (/). And I can only account for 3.2GB of the 6GB drive, and that is counting the "fake" space in /proc. My swap file is .5GB.

I have tried to find a runaway process but there is nothing obvious. I am running Apache, mysql, JBoss, but those systems do not have any users.

I was planning to add a new disk (I even have one right next to me), but I want to solve this mystery first.

Thanks so much for any help in advance!
RB

Tinkster · 02-14-2006, 07:18 PM

You may have a problem with some log-file that has been
deleted while it was still written to. In that case, try
switching to run-level one which will turn of all non-essential
stuff (which then should free the space). The thing with
that kind of usage is that the ls command won't find anything,
but the inodes are still occupied.

Cheers,
Tink

rhbgames · 02-14-2006, 07:20 PM

Thanks for the quick reply. I think I know how to do that from YaST, so I will do that tonight as soon as I get to the system and see how it goes. Thanks again!

RB

rhbgames · 02-14-2006, 10:26 PM

Using the expert mode in YaST I set the default run level to 1 and restarted. When the system came back up, it was still in default run level 5, but the good news is that all the disk space was restored - I have 2.5GB available. I don't know if it was the run level change or simply the restart, but the problem is resolved.

Thank you so much for the super fast and helpful response. Now my next challenge will be to install a new hard drive

. I think the last time I did this on a UNIX system, the standard drive was 71MB (yes, MB

).

RB

Tinkster · 02-14-2006, 11:49 PM

Hehe ... glad I got you in the right direction; just remember to watch
that behaviour, and next time before you start deleting files try to
observe which ones are growing ;}

And as for the size: wow :}
We only just retired an AIX box that had a 1GB HDD in it for an OS
(AIX 4.3) and a database...

Cheers,
Tink