[Lancaster] running out of space

[Richard Robinson]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 06:52:36PM +0100, Matt S Trout wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 01:59:54PM +0100, Taylor Nuttall wrote:
> > 
> > The problem I have is that the server is running out of space - this makes
> > no sense. There is around 2GB of server space allocated to us - we use
> > around 650Mb for current hosting, the OS will take up some more space, plus
> > we have majordomo, mySQL and e-mail.
> > 
> > I suspect there is some rogue e-mail spooler stacking up gradually, but
> > cannot find anything on the server that might correspond to some large files
> > in the region of the many Mb needed to clog up the server.
> 
> Or un-rotated log files or it's been 0wned.
> 
> Try this to find the offending files -
> 
> du -k / | sort -n
> 
> (you probably want to redirect that into a file, it'll be *big* :)

Yes. Or something based on
find / -type f -printf "%s %p\n" | sort -n
if you want more precision (remember to dodge, or ignore, things
like /proc, either way).

I remember talking with someone a while back, who had a filesystem
inexplicably running out of space. It turned out to be something that
was writing lots of stuff to a tempfile and not closing the file between
writes. And then refusing to die, but hanging around in the background.
So he thought he'd deleted the file, it didn't display in listings, but,
being still open, the space was still being taken up. I forget how we worked
that out, I think it involved lsof.

hth

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem