Hi. I was running Up2date and I got the message:

"The total size of selected packages is 525826 kB, but
You only have 507776 kB of free space.
Please unselect some packages and continue."

So I did 'df' as root and got the following:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 25197252 23410212 507064 98% /
/dev/sda2 101105 65555 30329 69% /boot
none 4074288 0 4074288 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/vastvolume-vastdata
535268552 106763980 401314508 22% /vastdata

Clealy its the /dev/sda3 which is nearly full.

I thought that getting Up2date erased previous versions of packages? If you do not need older versions, is it safe to delete them -- how can you do that safely?

In the past, I have simply updated and installed all available Up2date packages on offer by default, not thinking that I would come up with a size problem. As it happens, today there seems to be an unusally large set of Up2date pakages -- the largest number since I got RHEL more than a year a ago.

What is the best recommended policy on all of these issues, and what can I do to make sure that there is always enough free space for the new packages.

I am fairly new to LINUX management, so some kind soul will have to guide me instruction by instuction.

Cheeers in advaance.

Try reading /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date
It has lot's of options such as:
So as a suggestion clean the rpm files out of this directory and maybe change the keepAfterInstall value.

Thanks Lenord.

In my /var/spool/up2date directory, I have lots of files like:

libpng10-1.0.16-3.el4_5.1.src.rpm libpng10-1.0.16-3.src.rpm libpng-1.2.7-3.el4_5.1.src.rpm libpng-1.2.7-3.el4.src.rpm libsdp-1.1.99-7.i386.hdr libsdp-1.1.99-7.x86_64.hdr

which of these should I be deleting?

In my /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date, have the following options:


storageDir[comment]=Where to store packages and other data when they are retrieved
storageDir=/var/spool/up2date

.
.
.

updateUp2date[comment]=Allow up2date to update itself when possible
updateUp2date=1

keepAfterInstall[comment]=Keep packages on disk after installation
keepAfterInstall=0




The keepAfterInstall=0 presumably means that I do not keep any of the old rpm's or installations? What are my options is that is the case?

Thanks,

From the /var/spool/up2date directory as root type: rm *.rpm

But this will delete ALL of the *.rpm files won't it -- surely I want to keep the latest version?

By the way, what are *.hdr files - what do they do? Can I delete these as well?

Cheers

Then manually select by version number and/or date and keep the ones you want. As a suggestion move them to someplace else off the partition they are on, a CD/DVD/USB external drive comes to mind.

The *.hdr (header) files are the descriptions and requirements (partly) for the rpm packages. They are not needed for installation, they are used primarily to insure successful updating of the packages with dependencies.

Many thanks Lenard.

Things are ok now. I was unaware that *.rpm could be removed -- I thought that you had to keep them after installation. I have moved all the /vasr/spool/up2date contents to another partition and backed it up on an external device as well -- not that I will every need it.

Cheers