Re: rh 9 eating space

[ABrady <xunil kc rr com>]

On Mon, 19 May 2003 20:56:12 -0500
Ian Timshel <itschaotic yahoo ca> wrote:

> Hi all.
> I have a new install of RH 9 that I'm struggling with.  It sees as if
> I'm running out of space.  It was a tight install at any rate but I
> had left a few hundred megs of free space.  
> 
> Today it filled up so I booted to rescue mode and removed enough
> software and cleared up temp files and logs files to make room for a
> few hundred megs more.   This is just a trial of RH 9 to get the feel
> of it.
> 
> After rebooting and leaving the computer running for three hours I'm
> back in the same boat with no space.  Users can't log in properly etc.
>  
> 
> How might I trouble shoot this?  I have run "top" and watched but it
> seems normal with nothing grabbing my attention as a wild process gone
> to seed and the loads appear to be close to normal.
> 
> The things that have changed recently are that I have finally got the 
> machine to use my primary box as a router/gateway to ppp0.  I have
> also been playing unsuccessfully to use cups to have access to the
> printer.  Other than that I haven't had time to mess it up
> properly..heh

You may have a problem other than disk space. First, reboot and check
that. If it still has some left over, it's likely something else.

You don't mention anything about the hardware you have, so here are some
things to check. Keep in mind it may be something that's more specific
to a type of hardware, so don't think this will automatically solve
everything. But some of these are very strong suspects no matter the
hardware.

1. Memory. Bad memeory will give you lockups as you describe. If you can
do with less, remove one or more sticks and swap around to see if any
combinations make it stop locking up. An alternative is to download and
run memtest86 (search google; it's easy to locate). This can also take a
good while depending on the machine. But it might be faster than
swapping and testing various memory modules.

2. Screensavers. I've had screensavers lock everything up tight.
Especially the ones in KDE (which aren't the same ones run by gnome or
xscreensaver, even if they look like some of the same ones). I've also
had various ones lock things up (some of the more graphic-intense ones)
when using xscreensaver. Turn them all off if in KDE and manually run
and configure xscreensaver. Use only xscreensaver and pick a really
light one, like xjack or phosphor. Use only that one for awhile to see
if the problem stops. If you don't even use a screensaver, you can
probably ignore this part completely.

3. Consider a different desktop. I've seen both KDE and Gnome cause this
all by themselves, while something lighter, like XFCE or IceWM can
perform without problems. I haven't seen this from the later versions,
but they're still fluid enough that it can't be ruled out.

4. Turn off unneeded processes (run ntsysv as root and chose to turn
some of them off; you'll still need to manually turn them off
afterward by either [as root] 'service <service_name> stop' or by
rebooting, or even by changing to runlevel one and back; as root that
would be 'init 1' and when it eventually let's you type again, just
type 'exit'). Too many processes trying to do too many things at once
have caused me some problems (usually only on low-end hardware, but
possible on others). It's especially bad around 4 AM when everything
seems to want to do maintenance at once.

5. If disk space turns out to be the problem, change the schedule for
log rotation. The file to edit is /etc/logrotate.conf. You can change
all intervals to 1 instead of 4. In mine it will save a little bit of
space because there's only one there that isn't alreay a 1. So don't
depend on this to do that much.

6. As user su to root (that's 'su -') (or just log out and back in as
root) and read root's mail. Root gets a lot of mail and it won't clear
until it gets read. It's a good idea to eventually change the alias so a
user gets root's mail. That way it will get read more often. You can
read root's mail just by typing 'mail' at a command prompt. Root gets
enough mail that plenty of problems can crop up unless it gets cleared
at least daily if you have a machine with pretty low resources.

In all of the above, when I gave an example, such as 'word' don't type
the quotes, just what's beteen the quotes.

If none of those work, you might get better help with information about
the hardware you're dealing with.

-- 
Chaos, panic and disorder -- my work here is done.