Help! Something on my server is eating up all my /var space!

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Posted by Max Renn, 06-17-2007, 07:42 AM
Hello Over the past two days something has started eating up my /var space. I'm getting e-mails saying things like - Drive Critical: /dev/hda3 (/var) is 91% full - but when I do a df I get - /dev/hda3 2016044 1424440 489192 75% /var Weird! So I don't know whether df or cpanel is wrong. This is the output of du -sch /var/* 12K /var/account 12K /var/aquota.user 653M /var/cache 39M /var/cpanel 16K /var/crash 28K /var/db 24K /var/empty 456M /var/lib 8.0K /var/local 24K /var/lock 112M /var/log 16K /var/lost+found 4.0K /var/mail 513M /var/named 8.0K /var/nis 8.0K /var/opt 8.0K /var/portsentry 8.0K /var/preserve 4.0K /var/quota.user 208K /var/run 97M /var/spool 8.0K /var/tmp 8.0K /var/tux 48K /var/webmin 3.5M /var/www 24K /var/yp 1.9G total Any ideas anyone?? Thank you!
Posted by Zonkers UK, 06-17-2007, 08:32 AM
Try asking Rus at A2B2 he may be able to help you he is on here
Posted by CretaForce, 06-17-2007, 08:52 AM
I am not sure how cpanel counts the used space but du shows the real used space. 2GB for /var is not much. Maybe you can move some folders to another partition and create symbolic links.
Posted by smile4Neal, 06-17-2007, 09:05 AM
Hello, Sometimes du doesn't report files properly..... as root, try this one. That should spit out the 15 largest files on your System
Posted by smile4Neal, 06-17-2007, 09:39 AM
There are a lot of places in OS X that your Finder can't go. You may be collecting files in one of them. This will change to your system root, Run 'disk usage' and sort according to size, giving you the largest files first. Post back the first screenful and let's have a look. Is your computer stable? Has it been crashing? My guess is you have some large caches or maybe your system is saving the core file every time it panics.
Posted by ServerNinja, 06-17-2007, 11:21 AM
The reason for the discrepancy is that you may have deleted files or cleared the mail queue but not restarted the daemons that log to them, so as far as the OS is concerned the space is still occupied. You need to restart all the services whose logs you have cleared down.
Posted by tweakservers, 06-17-2007, 11:45 AM
if restarted does not helps, you may try to reboot the box
Posted by asc2000, 06-18-2007, 01:33 AM
My first guess is you have deleted some files that are stil open. Do a 'lsof | grep deleted' and restart the daemon if you'll see some large file in /var/log being held open by some daemon. -ASC-
Posted by SparkJim, 06-18-2007, 02:23 AM
Try running /scripts/fixquota from konsole ! How does the "disk usage" look on your WHM ?
Posted by anatolijd, 06-18-2007, 06:50 AM
maybe "91%" message is about free inodes (file descriptors) available, not free disk space? Have you checked output of this command? # df -i

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