dmesg command

[augusto cossa]

Good Day,

I have issued the command dmesg and the result was:

/stm: file system full
/archive: file system full
/home: file system full
file: table is full

But doing bdf the /stm is at 78% and /archive at 30% and /home is at 3%

What to do? Help.

A Cossa

[Andreas Voss · Accepted solution]

Hi,

have a look at /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log
there you can see when the messages appears (i think your full filesystems where in the past and now freed)

Greetings

ANdrew

[augusto cossa]

Andreas,

It seams that the dmesg displys information concernig the last memory used.

Thanks a lot.

A cossa

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Hi,

Check with sar -v. If file-sz was (eg 1200/1200), then know that your file table reached its set max. at one time. You can increase this value through the kernel parameter setting nfile to a higher value.

[CKT]

Looks like you or your users were running a program that wrote temporary data to those file systems and deleted them at the end. When a program consumes all the disk space at a given time dmesg logs it and it won't delete until you reboot your system. In your case, you should trust bdf's output.

[Andre van der Laarse]

Hi,
The buffer for dmesg is not very big, so you cannot see all the messages,
also there is no time-stamp, so like you have seen, there is no way
of telling when the incident was. In the manual page of dmesg(1M) it is
suggested that you emty the dmesg buffer in a logfile every ten minutes, via the crontab.
If you then change this log every day, you can use this log to see the
current dmesg messages.

[Bill Hassell]

dmesg does not timestamp error messages so finding out when an error occurred will require using a cron job and the dmesg - option. An example of how to do this is found in /usr/newconfig/var/spool/cron/crontab.root for 10.20 or /var/spool/cron/crontabs/crontab.root. In this example, dmesg - is run regularly and any new messages will be appended.

BTW: The logfile name used in the example is not very intuitive (/var/adm/messages). I like to change this to /var/adm/dmesg.log for easier recognition.