User receiving file system full message

[Tracey]

Early this morning one of my backup to disk processes filled up a disk, and I received my emailed error message and the message went into the syslog.log - so far no problem. I had a general user just show me a print screen that has the same error message displayed on her terminal. She has no system admin access, her UID is 159. Why did she get this message to her screen and how do I stop it? My users can get confused enough as it is without this kind of thing!

[Patrick Wallek]

The user that was receiving the file system full message probably had a process of some sort, whether they knew it or not, that was trying to write to the disk or LV that filled up. The application you are running was probably doing it automagically.

If the users process is trying to write to something that is full then I don't think there is a way to suppress those messages.

[Tracey]

The drive in question is a backup drive, it gets used for nothing but our nightly backups. I just double checked our temporary files for the database, and they don't write anything there either.

[John Bolene]

I would wonder if there were a wall command in the email script.

Wall sends it to anyone logged on.

[Tracey]

John,

Good try! I checked, but no cigar.

[Jim Moffitt_1 · Accepted solution]

It could be the way your /etc/syslog.conf file is set up. If there is a certain type of message, logger could send it to everyone. Here's a copy of how we have ours set up:
mail.debug /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
*.info;mail.none /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log
*.alert /dev/console
*.alert root
*.emerg *

Your's may be different. Once you edit this log file, do this:

to make syslogd, re-read its configuration file send it a HANGUP signal:
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslog.pid`
Hope this helps

[Vikas Khator]

Hi ,

Check your syslog.conf file . Maybe it is configured to write the message to users terminals.

If you have a * , I think it writes to the terminals of all logged-in users.

[Tracey]

Found the file Jim, it is exactly the same as yours. Any idea what the emerg is? Emergency messages maybe? Wonder if the includes "System is going down" messages too?

[Tom Danzig]

If the user configured thier terminal to be a console, they will get this type of message. The -C switch to xterm will cause it to receive console output.

Just a thought ...

[Jim Moffitt_1]

Tracey,
The .emerg does cover system going down messages, but also disk full. you could always configure it so it only goes to /dev/console, root, and your useraccount. I think you can do it this way and remove the * on the right hand side:

*.emerg /dev/console root

[Jim Moffitt_1]

If the above doesn't work properly try breaking them up on two separate lines:
*.emerg /dev/console
*.emerg root

and then user the command:
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslog.pid`