[lug] Cleaning up /var when it gets too full

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 09:11:46AM -0600, bof wrote:
>So most of the space is taken up by rpmrebuilddb and the dbbackup 
>directory, the contents of which are
>
>   9.5M    rpm-2002-07-25.tar.bz2
>   9.6M    rpm-2002-08-12.tar.bz2
>   9.7M    rpm-2002-08-28.tar.bz2
>   10M     rpm-2002-09-13.tar.bz2

These are copies of older RPM databases in case the main one on your system
gets corrupted or deleted.  If you don't care about this ability, remove
the "dbbackup" package ("rpm -e dbbackup") and remove these files.
dbbackup keeps the last month's worth of weekly copies of the RPM database.
It will also keep backups of your postgres database if you have it
installed, and MySQL if you have dbbackup configured with the right
password.

Sadly, mostly the problem is that, IMHO, a 125MB /var is just wrong...  As
pointed out, "/var/tmp" and "/tmp" is for temporary files, "/var" is for
things that change or are machine-specific.  So, there may be things in
that directory that stay around for quite a while, like web pages, DNS zone
files, postgres databases, etc...

I often will put /var under /, if not I'll make it at least 1GB --
otherwise it just tends to fill up quickly.  It's not hard to get 100MB of
logs alone, for example...

With the 8.x release, you should be able to fairly easily reduce the size
of another parition and re-allocate that space to /var...

Sean
-- 
 If you don't learn from a mistake you make, you've made two mistakes.
                 -- Sean Reifschneider, 2002
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin