sessionlog file too big - home dir fills up

[Kim McCain]

Hi,
I have an hp-ux11 machine with a few users who log in via exceed. Just recently, two users have gotten a "disk space full" message while working. Upon looking, the /home dir is full. In both cases, we traced the problem to a sessionlog file that had gone to >100MB in size. The user could not log out and noone else could log in. I logged in as root at the console and deleted the session file, but the machine still saw the partition as full so I had to reboot it. Has anyone had this problem?
Does anyone have any advice as to how I can keep this from happening again? Any way to clear this without having to reboot?

[Pete Randall]

I would say you need a way to trim this log file regularly so it doesn't get that big. How about a cron job?


Pete

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi Kim,

Next time try to truncate the files.

# cp /dev/null sessionlog

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[Steve Steel]

Hi


What is in the logfile

What fills it up


Steve Steel

[Kim McCain]

I should probably add that these files are in /home/xxx/.dt/sessionlogs directory and have names like: hpux1_DISPLAY:192.168.1.8:0 - there can be several of these files in each user's directory and ususally they are very small.
Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to look at the first sessionlog file. The 2nd one contained the same error message over and over - I'm assuming - I didn't scroll through the entire 109 MB file. It seemed to be complaining about an application license key being invalid, but the application named isn't even installed on that machine, so I'm just as mystified as before looking at it. I've been combing through the user's startup files and such, but this machine has run the same single graphics app for a couple years and nothing has changed (as far as I know!) on it for at least the last month. This is the first time I've had a problem with a large sessionlog file.
Thanks for your reply.

[Kim McCain]

Following along the line of some of the previous advice, I decided to disable the log creation for those users in their .dtprofile for now (dtstart_sessionlogfile=/dev/null) until I can figure out why this is happening. Hopefully, this won't cause other problem with their logins.

[Patrick Wallek]

The space was not recovered when you deleted the file because the file was still in use.

It's best to do an 'fuser filename' before removing a file to see who/what is accessing it.

To release that file you could have killed that particular users session and forcibly logged him/her out.

The best thing to do is figure who/what was generating that error message you saw. If you solve that, you whould solve your whole problem.