[NTLUG:Discuss] / filling up...

[Darin W. Smith]

On 24 Apr 2003 17:01:50 -0500, Wayne Dahl <w.dahl4 at verizon.net> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> Here's what has me concerned.  When checking disk space, / shows to be
> 92.6% full, 25.3 MB left out of 341.8 Megs.  Now, / is on its own
> partition, as are the rest of my major directories, ie. /boot, /swap,
> /var, /home, etc.  What I read when setting this box up was that /
> really didn't need a very big partition and 250 Megs would be fine.  I
> had a 40 Gig drive to split up, so I gave it more than was recommended. 
> Already, I would be in trouble if I had only given it 250 Megs of
> space.  So, what can I do about it?  What are your recommendations? What 
> happens if it fills up the partition?
>


What happens is usually not good.  It depends on what is really in there.  
Since you have /var on a separate partition, that will really help you out. 
 This happened to me in the past because I had /var as part of /, and it 
filled up, causing all kinds of problems as it tried to spool.

So I guess my question is, have you done a du to see what directory is 
eating your space?

My guess is that something that doesn't need to be is installing libraries 
into /lib.

/lib should only contain libraries necessary for booting the machine and 
operating in single-user mode.  Same for /bin (another possible culprit).

/usr/lib and /usr/local/lib should contain everything else (and /usr/bin, 
/usr/local/bin for binaries of course).

Now that very large hard drives are common, I decided last time I installed 
to set aside 1 Gig for /.  It's a small price to pay to not have to worry 
about this.

It is interesting to note that people regularly have / partitions in excess 
of 200 MB these days, when I used to run Linux, with X, on a 486/66 with 8 
MB ram and a 80MB (total) hard drive.  I remember having / partitions that 
were never larger than 3 MB.

What's happened?  All sorts of graphical mumbo-jumbo, and (IMHO) a bunch of 
cluttering of the root-level directories by RH and everyone else.

I see you haven't mentioned /tmp in your message.  Do you consider it a 
"major" directory?  I do, because it will be the staging area for sometimes 
(very) large temporary files--depending on your print spooler installation 
and ghostscript installation, some interim print files may wind up there.

-- 
D!
Darin W. Smith
AIM: JediGrover