Hi all,

I have a server running RH8 Pro and all my network services like Sendmail, DNS, DHCP, Samba, etc. All the other machines on the network are Winblows based. All of the other computers are either runnind MS Outlook or Outlook Express as an e-mail client. Last night, I returned from a trip and had about 150 e-mail messages when I checked on my computer, which uses Outlook 2002. Today, I checked my e-mail and only had one message, which is very odd. I didn't get any more e-mail for several hours, so I decided to try to send a test message. In Outlook, I got the following error:


Task 'goliath - Sending' reported error (0x800CCC78) : 'Unable to send the message. Please verify the e-mail address in your account properties. The server responded: 452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again later'

I checked a machine running Outlook Express and got this:

The message could not be sent because the server rejected the sender's e-mail address. The sender's e-mail address was 'nancy@bartlett-family.net'. Subject 'test', Account: 'goliath', Server: 'goliath', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again later', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 452, Error Number: 0x800CCC78

Obviously, the hostname of my server is "goliath", The e-mail account names are correct, and I don't have any idea how the disk could be full on the server. It has a 120GB HDD, with only about 30GB taken up. All of my other network services are running fine. I have done some searching on the web for help with this problem but am getting nowhere. Can anyone help?! I'd appreciate it greatly. Thank you.

Chris

PS. I am still somewhat of a , especially with sendmail, so feel free to talk to me like I'm a five year old, it may help me understand!

It does sound like you are out of space. By default RedHat creates a VERY small var partition - if that is where your mail is stored / queued then you may have a problem. Run:
df -h

To see your disk usage.

Hi David,

You just can't get rid of me! HA! Thanks for the help. I ran th "df -h" command. Here's the output:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4.8G 4.6G 0 100% /
/dev/hda3 107G 21G 80G 21% /home
none 377M 0 376M 0% /dev/shm

Ok, you're obviously right then, I am out of space. My mail all goes to /var/spool/mail and then the text files chris, nancy, john, etc. I looked in the directory and checked all thos files and they are all empty. How do I find out what is eating up all my space?! Argh... Also, is it possible for me to "take" 20GB of space out of /dev/hda3 and use it for /dev/hda1? Thanks again for all your help, you the man.

Chris

No problem.

To see what is using the space you will need to check all directories on that partition (var, etc, boot, usr, root etc).
1) cd var
2) du -hS | less
This prints the sizes in human readable format "h" and sorts by size "S" then puts the output in "less" for easier reading

I'm not sure how much you installed but 4.5 GB is not a lot for a full redhat install.

I can think of 4 options:
1) Use parted to resize your partitions
2) If you have free space on the HDD then create a new partition for /var or /etc
3) If it is storing mail in one of the directories then change the config to use another
4) Another option for the above - link the storage dir to a dir on /home

You may have a lot of stuff you don't need in /var/log or /var/cache.

The /var directory can grow to a pretty good size if old logs aren't removed, etc.

You have lots of room on /home.

You could make a directory /home/var, copy everything from /var to /home/var, then replace /var with a symbolic link to /home/var.

Easy copy:Revove /var directory:
rm -R /var

Create symbolic link
ln -s /home/var /var

It would be best done in linux single.

Thanks guys,

Ok, I think the easiest thing for me to do here is this:

Uninstall a whole bunch of programs (I blindly did a FULL install of RH 8.0) and now I realize I don't use half of it. How can I get a FULL list of everything installed on my machine, and how do I remove certain progs?

Resize the /dev/hda1 partition to 20GB total, from the 4.5GB it is right noe. I looked at the man page for "parted", but am a little confused. What would the command looke like to take about 15GB from /dev/hda3 and add it to /dev/hda1? Would this damage anything that is running? Should I shut down all me network services and so on first? Will this new partition remain intact if I were to reboot my machine, in other words, would the change be permanent? Will I lose any data?

Thanks a million guys!

Chris

To get a list of progs installed:
rpm -qa

To uninstall:
rpm -e package_name

Using parted "could" result in data loss although it is fairly reliable. (I have only done a test with it as I have never actually needed to use it) As for stopping network services - you'll need to do more than that. Down the system and boot into rescue mode ith cd1 (type "linux rescue" at the boot prompt). Personnaly I would chop space of home and use it to add /var and /etc partitions rather than increasing the root partition.

Finanlly - yes the change will be permenant. Obviously you could use parted to put it back but this will not really help you to recover any data that you may lose - make a good backup first (or cross you fingers - what ever works for you ).

I think Redhat may have gnorpm for the gui frontend to rpm in it's default install. It was in my 7.3.

# What packages are installed?
rpm -qa | sort

# How much space do they use up?
rpm -qca | xargs du -skc

# Uninstall command
rpm -e <package>

# Redhat links
RedHat Linux Manuals
Maximum RPM
rpmfind
Easier software management: apt4rpm - Red Carpet
RedHat 8.0 Tips & Tricks

# Redhat 8.0 configuration commands
Configure soundcard:
redhat-config-soundcard
Configure X server:
redhat-config-xfree86
Configure network:
redhat-config-network

Hi guys,

Ok, "du" is showing me that ./log in /var is 140MB! Is this unusual? Also, the /var/log/maillog file is 108 itself!! I went to /var/mail and the "root" file in there was also huge. I deleted that, but I don't want to delete "/var/log/maillog" unless you tell me it's safe to do so. Is it? Also, After deleting the "root" file in /var/mail, I restarted sendmail. Well, on "Shutting down sm-client", it failed that. Everything else with the restart went OK. Does this mean anything I should worry about? Thanks a million!

Chris

Been just running and no housecleaning, eh? Very dusty /var, I see.

Cron runs a job and the files are "rotated" and you may see lots of messages.1, maillog.27, etc. You were suppose to review these and delete if the system is running OK.

Schedule a cron job for yourself to review the logs and delete unneeded ones. You may have a ton of servers and services running as well if you did a blind "install everything". That means tons of log files generated. Uninstall things you aren't using.

The "Shutting down sm-client" failure probably meant that it wasn't running for some reason. If what you want to run starts, then not to worry.

Yep - It probably crashed because ou ran out of space.

Try restarting it again just to make sure it is OK.