[lug] /var/log/mail

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Ken" == Ken Weinert <kenw at ihs.com> writes:

Ken> Looking for some advice: is there any reason I would need to keep
Ken> the above file around? It's now a bit over 3M and the earliest
Ken> entry dates from last July.

move the file off, touch a new one, and compress the original.  log
files havea  *lot* of repetitive data, so they typically compress very 
well. 

Ken> So, after a certain number of power ups I get the "fsck due to
Ken> elapsed time" phenomenom. This isn't a problem, but I'd like to
Ken> know if there's a way to stagger this so that all partitions
Ken> don't do it at the same time. Due to partition sizes it can take
Ken> longer than I really want to wait :-) Any pointers on where to
Ken> look to find this info (or the info itself) will be very much
Ken> appreciated.

you can reset this timer by doing a manual fsck, typically in
single-user mode as root.  man e2fsck for more info.

you can also increase the number of fscks between forced checks; 
"man tune2fs" for more info on that.  (heed the warnings about not
doing it on mounted filesystems!  ... something else to do as root in
single-user mode!)

while you're tuning it, you can probably lower the number of blocks
reserved for the superuser only; on a 6G partition, it defaults to 1%, 
or 60M -- and that's for my non-critical /usr/local partition.
hm... i think i need to do that myself!

t.