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Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

 
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Jack C. Mahaffey
Super Advisor

Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

I need to free up some space on /var. We have crash files in /var/adm/crash/crash.0.

Is it okay to delete these files or move them to a separate directory? If yes, should I also delete the crash.0 directory and bounds file?
5 REPLIES 5
Patrick Wessel
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

Jack,

You have to decide on your own if you need the crash dumps any longer. Are they brand new, and you are not sure that you might want them to be analyzed? That save them to tape or to a different location on the disk.
After that you can delete the whole directory, but don't delete the bounds file. The only reason for this file is to keep track how many crash dumps have been written.
There is no good troubleshooting with bad data
Tom Danzig
Honored Contributor

Re: Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

The /var/adm/sw/save directory contains all data needed to rollback a patch and can take up lots of space on /var. If you have patches that you have no intention of uninstalling (ie: been installed for over a year), you can commit the patches to free up space. This will delete that save files since thet're no longer needed.

PS: I have just deleted the appropriate subdirectories in /var/adm/sw/save in the past. Anyone know if this will cause any problems later on?
James R. Ferguson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

Jack:

Yet another way to regain precious /var space is to run the 'cleanup' utility. See: 'man 1M cleanup' to review its usage. I routinely recover very significant amounts of space from /var following installations of large patch bundles. cleanup is the safest, recommended way to manage the /var/adm/sw/patch directory.

...JRF...
S. Karunanidhi
Occasional Advisor

Re: Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

Hi Jack!
There could be some log files which still need to be identified and deleted. (These files, sometimes grow like anything.) Use this command the list all the files which are of size more than 1MB.

#find /var -size +1000000c -print -exec ls -al {} ;

You might want to pipe the output to some file.

Regs.,
S.Karunanidhi
Karunanidhi.S
Emmanuel Eyer
Frequent Advisor

Re: Running out of space on /var...Is it okay to delete files in /var/adm/crash?

It may sound silly, but if you've got system crash dump files (what the files in /var/adm/crash are) and don't know why they are there, chances are pretty big that you can scrap them! Best cleaning is achieved by:
cd /var/adm/crash ; rm -rf *

If you really don't care about system crash dump files, you can disable the savecore (in 10.x) or savecrash (in 11.x) routine at startup thru the /etc/rc.config.d/savecore (aka savecrash in 11.x) configuration file (put the variable to 0).

Of course, you may also wonder why you got those crash dumps. Basically, either you used the TOC button (generates a crash dump), or you got a software problem (kernel panic) or a hardware failure (HPMC - typically a SIMM problem).

Other means to free up some space in /var is to trim the various log files, such as utmp, sulog (I saw once a sulog of 100 MB), the sw*log files (in /var/adm/sw)... You can use SAM if you whish (go into Routine Tasks / Log Files, or something similar).

Hope it helps, Emmanuel