Hi,

We have a system which var partition reached 105% with a negative size ...
I would like to know what it means.
It's FreeBSD (I don't know if I'm at the right place)

olive

Usually the amount reported as free is with the reserve space in a filesystem. That is for most users it appears to be full (100%) before it actually is because there is a reserve. The 105% shows you are using the reserve.

You should immediately work on cleaning up /var rather than spending time on what this means. Hitting 85% is not good. Hitting 95% is worse and at 100% its really bad.

Look at /var/tmp and see if there is anything large you can get rid of right away. (Make sure it is not currently in use.)
Look at /var/log and /var/spool files and subdirectories to see if anything has gotten very large.
Look at /var/preserve and see if you have any huge mail files there. root usually is huge if you're not reading it regularly.

cd /var
du -sk * |sort -n

That will show you the largest things in /var itself. You can then go to any subdirectory it specified (e.g. /var/preserve) and do the same command.

Thank you for these tips. We know we have to clean up the logs (I guess it's done now). I asked for my personal information as it sounded weird to me.

Thanks again,

olive