[plug] How to trim down the size of /var files

[Steege, Phil E]

Tony & PLUG

Thank you.  Those suggestions fixed my problem.

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima [mailto:tony at cantech.net.au] 
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 9:10 PM
To: PLUG
Subject: Re: [plug] How to trim down the size of /var files


On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Steege, Phil E wrote:

> When I originally installed my redhat 7.3 system I set /var on its own 
> 500Mb partition, just in case I got a lot of error messages, so it 
> would not overflow my system. Lately, due to much 'tinkering' with the 
> system I generated a lot of error messages and the /var partition was 
> getting above 90% of space used. I was able to delete and trim some of 
> the files, such as messages, messages.1, messages.2....etc.

If you don't care about the meesages generated by your machine covered in
those date, then there will be no issues with deleteing and of the
messages.[0-9] files

> My lastlog file is very large now.  It is a data file and I do not 
> know if I can just delete it.  Will the system re-create the lastlog 
> file automatically?

Just cat /dev/null > lastlog, shoulddo it.

> Also the wtmp is getting bigger.  How can those 'data' files be 
> trimmed when they become too large?

cp -a utmp utmp.back
cat /dev/null > utmp
# optionally
gzip -9 utmp.back

Having said all that, look into logrotate.

on my RedHat 6.1 system /etc/logrotate.conf says: /var/log/lastlog {
    monthly
    rotate 12
}

That could easily be changed to:
/var/log/lastlog {
    daily
    rotate 1
}

Then you're only ever keeping todays and yesterdays lastlogs around.

Most packages should install there logrotate setup in: /etc/logrotate.d/

HTH

Yours Tony

   Jan 22-25 2003           Linux.Conf.AU            http://linux.conf.au/
		  The Australian Linux Technical Conference!