On Wed, Apr 5, 2023 at 12:23 PM Kevin Cozens via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2023-04-04 17:50, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
GTALUG's server's filesystem filled up: little disk space left.
I've had that happen to me in the past where the disk space on a server suddenly runs out. One of the reasons it happened was due to the log file of some program growing out of control.
To avoid the problem in the future I always have servers running logwatch. It gives me a daily report of system activity based on various log files. Of particular relevance to the topic of this message thread is the bit near the bottom. It reports on in use and available disk space. Assuming nothing major happens in a day to fill up the space I can keep an eye on disk usage and take action long before the amount of free space gets to a dangerously low level.
The other part of keeping an eye on things is running logrotate to keep the size of log files under control. Both logwatch and logrotate run daily.
Quite a number of years ago a now deceased mentor advised that a great way to reduce the problem caused by a runaway var file was to use separate /var and /usr partitions (from / and /home). Together with the foregoing - - - - well you should just never have a problem. HTH