Hello,

I know this sort of thing has been hashed over before, so here is a different spin. I have a server running Slackware 10.1, who keeps filling up it's Root partition (apparently on it's own).

So, is there a way to monitor/log disk write actions to a partition?

If such is possible, then perhaps I could "keep a watch" on what is eating up the space, and then solve the problem.

Any ideas/suggestions are welcome.

By monitoring this you would in fact be taking up more space.
Are there any repeated log entries in your /var/log/syslog?

I'm no expert, but some quick questions come to my mind.

1. Are you rotating and deleting old logs?
2. Are you running scripts, either at bootup or periodically with cron (or both) that routinely deletes unnecessary temporary files?
3. Do you use separate /var and /tmp partitions? Those file systems usually are the culprits for filling disk space.
4. As this box is a server, are you providing user storage space and if so, are you using disk quotas?
5. Which kinds of files or directories are consuming the most space?

To help answer some of these questions the du and df commands will provide disk usage information.

You also can use the find command to search for files exceeding a certain size or a certain age.

There are other tools such as Gkrellm that might help.

If you are using KDE, then Konqueror in file manager mode or the KFind utility are helpful in visually understanding where the problems occur.

There is a mini How-To here at LQ that might help:

Monitoring Harddrive usage automatically

Go to your root partition (logged in as root) and enter the following command

du -s * | sort -n

Now you can see which directory's are taking up a lot of space.

check those directory's and repeat the du command if needed.

It's probably your logs (/var/log).

What confuses me is that the "ususal suspects" (eg: /var/log/ & /tmp) are both on seperate partitions. I will post back again once I have a scan over the logs to see if anything comes of that.

df -h output:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 950M 950M 0 100% /
/dev/sda6 19G 2.6G 15G 15% /usr
/dev/sda7 1.9G 37M 1.8G 3% /opt
/dev/sda8 479M 9.3M 445M 3% /tmp
/dev/sda9 19G 780M 17G 5% /var
/dev/sda10 47G 21G 24G 48% /share
/dev/sda11 94G 12G 77G 14% /home
/dev/sdb1 147G 314M 139G 1% /mnt/hosting
/dev/sdc1 147G 38G 102G 27% /mnt/backup
/dev/sde1 230G 17G 202G 8% /mnt/usbhuey

fstab
/dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda6 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda7 /opt ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda8 /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda9 /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda10 /share ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda11 /home ext3 suid,dev,exec 0 2
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/hosting ext3 suid,dev,exec 0 2
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/backup ext3 suid,dev,exec 0 2
/dev/sde1 /mnt/usbhuey ext3 defaults 1 1
#/dev/sde1 /mnt/usblouie ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/sdf1 /mnt/usbdewey ext3 defaults 1 1
#/dev/sdg1 /mnt/usbdonald ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0