You need to run du on just the / directory. Do this:
du -kx / | sort -rn > /var/tmp/du.root
Now the file /var/tmp will have all the directories in / sorted by size. The largest directories are:
31056 /
18979 /sbin
9331 /etc
6680 /etc/opt
3676 /sbin/fs
No other directories should show up in this list more than a few Kbytes. Growth in / is caused by sysadmin mistakes or intallers that fail to ask the sysadmin where files should be stored.
/dev should NOT be larger than about 20-40 Kbytes (the -k option for du reports in Lb) If /dev is large, there are ordinary files in /dev (there should never be any). Most common are files like /dev/rmt/om or /dev/null. Find all the files in /dev with:
find /dev -type f -exec ll {} \;
There should be nothing shown. If /dev/null shows up as an ordinary file, do this:
rm /dev/null
mknod /dev/null c 3 2
If the root user accidently removes /dev/null, then it will become an ordinary file, possibly megs in size. If the / directory is the largest in the du.root file, then sort all the / files with:
ll / | sort -rnk5 | head
There should be *no* ordinary files in /, just directories. Unfortunately, HP-UX (and a few other Unix flavors) defauot root's $HOME directory to /, probably the worst possible location. Note that logfiles, email, spool files, etc are not in the / directory so this isn't the problem.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
