WTF!? No space left?

[bobtcowboy]

So I go to get my email this morning, and I find out that my Hard drive partition for linux 3945 MB (4 gig!) is full ?!?!

After installation, it was at 51%... I downloaded kvirc and mozilla (but I haven't gotten around to installing it) and copied my mail boxes over (say 20 meg or so)

how on earth did it fill up? :( :confused:

Wait a minute... I had to do a hard reboot one time... could that cause 2 gig to appear out of nowhere?



When I shut linux down and got outta X, I saw a picture, almost like a splash screen of the earth and a bunch of different words written in red scattered across it....

Did someone get into my computer? Do I have a virus or something? Am I now getting too paranoid?





Will I be able to boot back into linux as a user, or will I have to boot into single-user mode?

AHHHH!!! I'm freaking out! :mad: :( :eek:



ACK! Help!

Bill

[ 13 February 2001: Message edited by: bobtcowboy ]

[ 13 February 2001: Message edited by: bobtcowboy ]

[pbharris]

hello,
is this box in the internet all the time? do you have a bunch of unknow porcesses running? how is /var for disk usage?

[Tyr-7BE]

What part of linux has the 4 gig partition? Is it /? /boot (I hope not)? other? How much do you have allotted for swap, boot, root, and others?

[demian]

Originally posted by Tyr-7BE:
When I shut linux down and got outta X, I saw a picture, almost like a splash screen of the earth and a bunch of different words written in red scattered across it....


Are these words names of major cities by any chance?? This sounds much like xearth running literally underneath you normal background image. Do a ps ax|grep xearth (while X is up) and see if it's running. Most likely it is spawned from within your windowmanager start-up scripts or .xinitrc

As for disk space have a look at the output of du and search for unusally large files and directories (mayby browser cache or log files) search /tmp and /var/tmp for old files and make sure they get deleted regularly.

[bobtcowboy]

Thanks for the quick responses guys... for some reason when I booted back into linux just now, it shows that I'm doing just fine on HD space.... at 54% used...


is this box in the internet all the time? do you have a bunch of unknow porcesses running? how is /var for disk usage?


Yes, its always online... and I leave it on when I go to bed... as far as unknown processes my machine averages in the 60-70 range, and they're all unknown as far as I'm concerned at the moment... I just installed it 3 days ago... /var totaled up to 60 MB... is that typical?

Originally posted by demian:
Are these words names of major cities by any chance?? This sounds much like xearth running literally underneath you normal background image. Do a ps ax|grep xearth (while X is up) and see if it's running. Most likely it is spawned from within your windowmanager start-up scripts or .xinitrc


I'm not sure... I did a ps ax|grep xearth in eterm and it comes up with

2614 pts/1 S 0:00 grep xearth

does this mean that it's finding its own process? I think that must be the case, because when I try to 'kill 2614 it doesn't find a process 2614... and if I run the command again, the process ID changes...

so that means that I'm not running xearth, right? I'm going to reload X and see if I can find out what those words are...


As for disk space have a look at the output of du and search for unusally large files and directories (mayby browser cache or log files) search /tmp and /var/tmp for old files and make sure they get deleted regularly.

/tmp only has 1.2 MB and /var/tmp has 4K...


What part of linux has the 4 gig partition? Is it /? /boot (I hope not)? other? How much do you have allotted for swap, boot, root, and others?


all of the 4 GB is all in / I know, I know... but I just wanted to start out simple with one directory.... /swap has 133 MB

So I still don't know what that earth thing is, and now my hard drive is cleared up again... so what was the cause? did it have something to do with that hard reboot I had to do?


OK... now I'm feeling a lot like Dana from Ghostbusters. I swear I shut down X, and saw a picture of earth in the background with words written in red on it. I think one of them started with a C, but I was pretty sure I didn't recognize any of them. No, it didn't say Zuul.


Thanks,
Bill

[ 13 February 2001: Message edited by: bobtcowboy ]

[demian]

Originally posted by bobtcowboy:
So I still don't know what that earth thing is, and now my hard drive is cleared up again... so what was the cause? did it have something to do with that hard reboot I had to do?

Apparently your box is set up to clean up at reboot. Now if you don't reboot frequently this doesn't really help and you should consider adding cron jobs to do this clean up, say, every other day.

BTW you experienced a good example of why it not a wise idea to have just one large / partition. Whenever I install linux I put it on at least five partitions
/
/usr
/var
/home
swap

and then symlink /tmp to /var/tmp. Often I have a separate /tmp partition. This way / can be as small as 50MB or less and when I run out of disk space it most likely won't be on the / partition where this can cause severe damage. In addition if you have several harddrives distributing the partitions on both improved I/O performance immensely.

On xearth again: I'm actually pretty positive that you have this thing running. It's a picture of the earth on a black background (maybe sprinkled with stars), water is blue and continents are green, right? However, the grep output you posted indeed didn't indicate it's running... :confused: Search through your X and windowmananger startup scripts for any clues. (You can use grep here also)

[bobtcowboy]

huh.... I'll check on that xearth thing later... and cron jobs to clean up, eh? what directories should they be flushing other than /var/tmp and /tmp ?

oh... and is there any way I can reconfigure the way my hard drive is partitioned now, without uninstalling and starting from scratch? for a 4 gig HD, how would you break down the partitions?

Thanks for all your help, dude
Bill