I should preface my reply by saying that (1) I am very new to Linux even though I have done a few things in Unix (2) About a week ago I volunteered myself to look at the exact same problem.

I am using Putty.

One of the first things I did was begin to review the /var/log directory via logrotate. Specifically several files sitting inside of /var/log/httpd. I changed etc/logrotate.d/httpd to make it inclusive of everything setting in that path. If your code says: "/var/log/httpd/*log {" you may want to change it to say: "/var/log/httpd/* {"
Then /usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf. I then moved the logs to /home/backups/xxxx. I also created new etc/logrotate.d/xxxxx for other logs.

I also reviewed another directory /realp which had old archive files...I also moved those to /home/backups/xxxx.

I manually evaluated every directory within root to find that /srv was taking up the majority of space at 41,654,748. I am now taking a look at the structure and using this has helped:

find . -size +1000000 -print <--- will display the results

So I am interested to hear more about this!

Hi Marcus,

thanks for your reply, but im afraid you didnt understand the question.

The issue is not with a file, such as a log file in /var filling up - in my original post you can look at the way the server is partitioned. this means that any files in /var live on a different partition.

Also in my original post, i did mention that this server has NFS mounts - meaning there are terabytes of files - doing a find on the / filesystem would therefore be inappropriate in this case

but thanks anyway. And keep on learning linux.