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/var grow up irregular

 
Achilles_2
Regular Advisor

/var grow up irregular

Hello All,

Do anyone know that how come the size of /var directory increasingly grew up? I check the /var patrition by bdf command and found the number in the "available" column is decreasing. What actual background process need to touch /var?

Thanks
19 REPLIES 19
AwadheshPandey
Honored Contributor

Re: /var grow up irregular

TY 007
Honored Contributor

Re: /var grow up irregular

Hello Achilles,

>> What actual background process need to touch /var?

Issue command: # fuser /var

Example:
/var: 770o(root) 592o(root) 589o(root) 1488mo(root) 617o(root) 618o(root) 735o(root) 839o(root) 1153cm(root) ........

Thanks
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: /var grow up irregular

/var is one of the most used file systems on a UNIX box. /var/tmp is the default location for application temporary files. The lp spooler subsystem uses /var/spool and mail uses /var as well. Moreover /var/adm/syslog is the location for syslog.log and mail.log which can grow very large. All of this is normal but filling up /var can bring a system to its knees so the wise plan is to create separate mountpoints for /var/tmp, /var/spool/lp, and /var/mail.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Amit Parui
Valued Contributor

Re: /var grow up irregular

The best way to find this out would be to take the file thats eating up the space, so find it as below -

find /var -xdev -size +500000c -mtime -3 -exec ls -altr {}\; | sort -r -n -k 5 | more

or

to really dig down /var filesystem try -

du -sk * | more

and check out for the large files there.

Hope this wud help u !!!
If Life gives u a ROCK, its upto u to build a BRIDGE or a WALL !!!
wittie
Frequent Advisor

Re: /var grow up irregular

Another possible reason for /var being increased is if the system has crashed. Crash dumps are written in /var/adm/crash and they are normally really large.

Use this command to find out which files/directories are filling up /var

# du -akx /var | sort -nr | more

Then you can decide if you can delete something to free up space.
Suraj Kumar Sankari
Occasional Advisor

Re: /var grow up irregular

Achilles,
First do fuser -cu to check who is using /var
check is there any batch program is runing and chech what is the output goes may be someone give the output directory is /var
or u can check /var/spool directory some time I have found some old big file over there just delete all old file
hope it will work
Achilles_2
Regular Advisor

Re: /var grow up irregular

Hi ALL,

I found that one of file called the error.log which is located at /var/opt/dce/svc is so big (7610368 bytes) and its contains all the same line like that

2007-08-23-05:22:47.541+00:00I----- dced ERROR dhd hostdata epops.c 1021 0x7b5c4ed4 Postprocessor for /opt/dcelocal/bin/ep_scavenger exited with status 2

What is the function of dce?
Achilles_2
Regular Advisor

Re: /var grow up irregular

Now when I ran "last" and "lastb" command, it will show the error :

Invalid record size. Unable to continue ...

The size of wtmps is 197181440
The size of btmps is 1127690940
Dennis Handly
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: /var grow up irregular

>Now when I ran "last" and "lastb" command, it will show the error:
Invalid record size. Unable to continue ...
The size of wtmps is 197181440
The size of btmps is 1127690940

I'm not sure you care about this info? You could copy it and then empty those files.
If you want to try repairing them, see fwtmp(1M).

See this other thread if you are on 11.23 or later:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1149632