Hi All,
I am a windows admins needed to support Linux. Today I realise that my hda1
is full which ussually got about 1GB of free space. It is very unussual for
the 1GB to be used within a day cause I am the only one that can access to
the drive & no shared folder has being created on this drive. (Home Drive is
on another drive). Is there a way to check what use up the space & what is
safe to delete?

FYI, It is running Samba Server & SendMail Server.

BTW, will it cause kernel panic if boot drive is out of space?

CL wrote:

> I am a windows admins needed to support Linux. Today I realise that my
> hda1 is full which ussually got about 1GB of free space. It is very
> unussual for the 1GB to be used within a day cause I am the only one that
> can access to the drive & no shared folder has being created on this
> drive. (Home Drive is on another drive). Is there a way to check what use
> up the space & what is safe to delete?

du -hs /*

and work your way down.

> FYI, It is running Samba Server & SendMail Server.

it may be your incoming mailboxes, in /var/spool/mail

> BTW, will it cause kernel panic if boot drive is out of space?

ask yourself, would windows be happy if it would run out of disk space?

CL wrote:

> Is there a way to check what use up the space & what is
> safe to delete?

Two likely suspects are /var/spool/mail and /var/log. Nothing is safe to
delete if you're not sure what it is :-)

Good luck,
Jeffrey

"Dominik L.. Borkowski" <dom@vbi.vt.edu> wrote in message
news:cjt7f5$fg$1@solaris.cc.vt.edu...
> CL wrote:
>
> > I am a windows admins needed to support Linux. Today I realise that my
> > hda1 is full which ussually got about 1GB of free space. It is very
> > unussual for the 1GB to be used within a day cause I am the only one
that
> > can access to the drive & no shared folder has being created on this
> > drive. (Home Drive is on another drive). Is there a way to check what
use
> > up the space & what is safe to delete?
>
> du -hs /*
>
> and work your way down.
>
> > FYI, It is running Samba Server & SendMail Server.
>
> it may be your incoming mailboxes, in /var/spool/mail
>
> > BTW, will it cause kernel panic if boot drive is out of space?
>
> ask yourself, would windows be happy if it would run out of disk space?
>

Thank Dominik for the fast reply.
The person who setup the server solved the problem. He told me it is cause
by unproper mounting. However, he didn't tell me how unproper mounting can
eat up the space & how to claim back the space next time? Anyone mind
telling me?

> ask yourself, would windows be happy if it would run out of disk space?
I thought Linux is so good that it can find the diskspace somewhere else or
even created from air.

CL wrote:

> The person who setup the server solved the problem. He told me it is cause
> by unproper mounting. However, he didn't tell me how unproper mounting can
> eat up the space & how to claim back the space next time? Anyone mind
> telling me?

sure. go ask the person who told you this very vague explanation.

Too vague? Okey you see, I setup a cron job to copy some files to a XP
system at night. Sometime it just fail to mount. Without doing anything,
when I try to mount again in the morning, no problem at all. I think this is
what he mean by unproper mounting. Will this make it a little more not so
vague?

I tried to ask him but he is not so friendly or patient to explain to me..

"Dominik L.. Borkowski" <dom@vbi.vt.edu> wrote in message
news:cjtc5p$61p$1@solaris.cc.vt.edu...
> CL wrote:
>
> > The person who setup the server solved the problem. He told me it is
cause
> > by unproper mounting. However, he didn't tell me how unproper mounting
can
> > eat up the space & how to claim back the space next time? Anyone mind
> > telling me?
>
> sure. go ask the person who told you this very vague explanation.

Thank you. Problem solved.

"Jeffrey Froman" <jeffrey@fro.man> wrote in message
news:10m4anaic98ip03@corp.supernews.com...
> CL wrote:
>
> > Is there a way to check what use up the space & what is
> > safe to delete?
>
> Two likely suspects are /var/spool/mail and /var/log. Nothing is safe to
> delete if you're not sure what it is :-)
>
> Good luck,
> Jeffrey

"CL" <cl@xstreamy.com> wrote in message news:<41620e21$1_1@news.tm.net.my>...
> Hi All,
> I am a windows admins needed to support Linux. Today I realise that my hda1
> is full which ussually got about 1GB of free space....
> Is there a way to check what use up the space & what is
> safe to delete?

Do as root:

# cd /
# du -hsx *

M.

CL <cl@xstreamy.com> wrote:
> The person who setup the server solved the problem. He told me it is cause
> by unproper mounting. However, he didn't tell me how unproper mounting can
> eat up the space & how to claim back the space next time? Anyone mind
> telling me?

I can only guess:

If your /etc/fstab is broken, it may be that some of your file systems
are not mounted as they should on system startup.

If, for example, your /var is on another file system, but is not mounted
during startup, programs will happily scribble into the /var directory,
which is the mount point in the root file system (since /var didn't mount).

This will cause the root file system to fill up.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

As simple as that. How come I never think of it. Thanks Laurenz.

Laurenz Albe wrote:
> CL <cl@xstreamy.com> wrote:
>
>>The person who setup the server solved the problem. He told me it is cause
>>by unproper mounting. However, he didn't tell me how unproper mounting can
>>eat up the space & how to claim back the space next time? Anyone mind
>>telling me?
>
>
> I can only guess:
>
> If your /etc/fstab is broken, it may be that some of your file systems
> are not mounted as they should on system startup.
>
> If, for example, your /var is on another file system, but is not mounted
> during startup, programs will happily scribble into the /var directory,
> which is the mount point in the root file system (since /var didn't mount).
>
> This will cause the root file system to fill up.
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe