Re: Hard Drive Space

From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 05/28/05


Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 20:54:46 -0500

In article <119cfn5frn4u863@corp.supernews.com>, Mark wrote:

>Hi. Sorry, brain cramp. Rehat 9, Kernel 2.4.20-8.

That's only marginally better than RH7.0. 2.4.20-8 is the original
out-of-box kernel that Red Hat updated at least nine times over the life
of the distribution, and 'download.fedoralegacy.org' released yet another.

So it sounds as if you haven't updated this system for all of the
security problems it had over the life of the distribution. When RH
dropped support for this release on May 01 of _last_ year, there were
329 packages available for update on their updates.redhat.com server. I
don't know how many fedoralegacy.org has added.

>If I issue a df -h command I can watch the hard drive free space decrease in
>size by about 4k every 5 miuntes. It's like somethin is writing to a log or
>database constantly, but I cannot find anything that is doing that.

'du' measures directory entries - df measures actual space in use at the
moment which would include deleted (but in use) files.

If 'du -s' is showing a constant value, but 'df' is showing a steady decrease
in the space, either the box is 0wn3d, or you have a process that is writing
to a closed (deleted) file. The usual explanation for the last item is that
you (for example) 'rm'ed a log file like /var/log/messages but didn't restart
the logging daemon so that it knows to close the old file, and get a new file
handle (to the new file). Most processes get a file handle with the start,
and keep it open while they are "using" the file. They don't know that you
may have deleted the file, and keep writing/reading to that original file.

If you don't recall removing some log file manually, perhaps one solution
would be to reboot the system (which would close all files, including
deleted ones). You can also use 'lsof' or 'fuser' to see what processes
are accessing the disk.

        Old guy



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