purging disk space help

viniosity · 08-13-2008, 09:47 PM

I need to clear some disk space from a Debian server. I've gone through and run apt-get clean as well as apt-get autoclean. It looks like the majority of the files taking up space are in /var/spool/Spamassassin.

I don't have access to the individual email accounts so I'm not sure if there's a "proper" way to remove those files. Is it bad to just rm -rf the contents of the /var/spool/spamassassin directory? Is there a recommended way to purge those files?

danboland · 08-13-2008, 10:52 PM

If thats where user's email is quarantined for spam then i would write a script that automatically deletes messages older then X days. And then make sure that they know that the server policy is to delete all spam that is that old.

viniosity · 08-13-2008, 10:55 PM

It's my first time on this box.. the old admin quit in a huff and sort of walked out. I'm doing damage control so I'm afraid I don't know much.

The server is 100% full and there's 4GB of stuff in the /var/spool/spamassassin folder.. I'd love to just rm -rf it but I've no idea if spamassassin would complain or stop working properly if I did that..

danboland · 08-14-2008, 11:04 PM

Most of what is in there I believe is user spam database from sa-learn.

you can try:

Code:

sa-learn --force-expire

Let me know if that solves anything.

viniosity · 08-15-2008, 05:26 AM

No, unfortunately that didn't seem to purge any actual emails (at least disk space usage is unchanged..) Thanks for trying though.

pixellany · 08-15-2008, 05:46 AM

If the server is 100% full, you need to do a lot more than clean out that one directory.

Why not backup the directory onto another drive (server, DVD, etc.). Then delete it and see if anyone misses it. (Tell people first what you are doing.)

More generally, do users have disk quotas? (Perhaps they should.)