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Partition filling up


johnd
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Hi

 

I have a classroom Samba server running Mandriva 2008 64 bit. I have a separate partition for HOME which as well as storing the users directories, holds the library (common files) for the classroom.

 

I estimate I have about 20G of files on the partition but it is currently nearly full and appears to grow in size automatically (currently about 7G from filling the 230G or so). A couple of days ago it reached 100% - I'm glad it is a separate partition or else the consequences would have been more serious).

 

I have made sure that the ksnapshot tool is turned off (in fact I uninstalled it to make sure). The other partitions (/, /var, /boot) do not have the problem in growing in size.

 

Of course I suppose some student might be having me on!! - but I suspect something more boring than this!

 

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

John

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I would suspect the temp folder. You should be able to empty it without effecting anything.

 

It is a good idea to install filelight. It is an excellent tool for seeing what is sizes of all various files and folders on your system. That is how I found out that the temp folder was the cause of a problem back when I had much smaller sized HDDs.

 

Cheers. John.

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The tool you need to uninstall is draksnapshot not ksnapshot (ksnapshot takes screen shots of the screen creating pics : ) )

 

What's the output of this run in terminal:

du -akx /home/user | sort -nr | head -n 100

 

replace user with your actual user name.

 

Thanks everyone - left replying until I was back at work. The command above revealed a .xsession-errors of about 200G for my user account!!! (If I read the number of digits right!

 

I deleted this with rm but still have a percentage fill of about 94% so will continue the search!

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I guess that the /home/tmp folder is the one growing considerably - unless you have a filesharing / bittorrent tool installed, which can eat up enormous harddisk-space.

Thanks - but there is no /home/tmp on my system. There is a /home/.Trash-0 but I have checked in there.

 

JOhn

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Thanks - but there is no /home/tmp on my system. There is a /home/.Trash-0 but I have checked in there.

 

JOhn

 

/home/username/tmp

Each user account has a /tmp folder (and a trash folder /home/username/.local/share/Trash)

 

Jim

Edited by jkerr82508
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/home/username/tmp

Each user account has a /tmp folder (and a trash folder /home/username/.local/share/trash)

 

Jim

 

Doesn't seem to be anything too much there - about 49M for me and most other users are SMB so I guess they don't generate a temp folder.

 

JOhn

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I am getting an inconsistency here:

 

1. If I go to /home and issue du I get a total space of 32G used (which sounds right to me).

 

2. If I issue df I get 214G of 230G used - and there is nothing in the trash.

 

Have to go for a while now but will continue the investigation later.

 

Thanks

John

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I am not sure you are looking in the right place for temp or tmp as it is called..

It is in /home/<your account>/tmp and is alongside Desktop.....Documents......Download.......Music.......Pictures......tmp.......Videos. This is the one I have found can fill up very quickly if you are doing lots of surfing and downloading.

Have you tried using filelight to find what is taking up do much space or do you prefer to stumble around in the dark ???. :D

 

Cheers. John.

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After deleting .xsession-errors reboot, a new file with the same name will be created. Now see what's its size after an hour or so of operation. If the size is growing monstrously then just deleting it won't work. Best way is to try and see what's causing so many errors in the file.

 

Something else, in /home you only have your user folder or other folders as well, for other users?

 

I think you should use

du -akx /home | sort -nr | head -n 100

 

BTW the output is in bytes so 200GB would look like this 200,000,000 .

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After deleting .xsession-errors reboot, a new file with the same name will be created. Now see what's its size after an hour or so of operation. If the size is growing monstrously then just deleting it won't work. Best way is to try and see what's causing so many errors in the file.

 

Something else, in /home you only have your user folder or other folders as well, for other users?

 

I think you should use

du -akx /home | sort -nr | head -n 100

 

BTW the output is in bytes so 200GB would look like this 200,000,000 .

I am at home now so further details will be checked tomorrow.

 

The home folder has my directory, 40 SMB directories (MS WIndows h: drives on the LAN) and a shared library.

 

I have checked the lot for any sign of rogue large files - nothing surprising.

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Have you tried using filelight to find what is taking up do much space or do you prefer to stumble around in the dark ???. :D

 

Cheers. John.

 

Just downloaded and tried Filelight on my PCLOS system at home - it is a great GUI tool but I don't think it shows me anything that the du tool with switches and pipelines doesn't. It is worth adding to my toolbox though.

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I have solved the problem with the magic reboot - it was a bit scary since this is a new server and it is in daily use - it came across orphaned inodes etc but eventually restarted showing the correct amount of disk space used.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

John

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Orphaned inodes doesn't sound good to me. You might want to get that checked out - it could end up in severe data loss. Had something similar recently, and thought I had lost all my data, only to find I could recover it from LostAndFound. I was lucky, sometimes it's not so easy!

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