[plug] Disk space follow-up

[Patrick Coleman]

On 6/14/06, Dave Dartnall <darts at dialix.com.au> wrote:
> Regarding installation of LVM, my experience as promised.
>
<snip>
>
> There are just two points which you may be able to clear up:
>
> 1. df  returns for my new filesystem:
>              /dev/mapper/main-lv_usr    6.0G  2.4G  3.7G  39% /usr
>     and not as I expected:
>              /dev/main-lv_usr    6.0G  2.4G  3.7G  39% /usr

Thats normal. AFAIK, there's no difference between /dev/mapper/VG-LV
and /dev/VG/LV, it just appears to be different syntax for the same
thing. Someone else may know exactly why this is the case :)

> 2. You suggest that I "Clean up old log files (in /var/log) before you
> do anything else"
>             Specifically does that mean that all files in ?var/log can
> be deleted? Even as root, they don't seem to want to go!

The log files give you a record of whats happened on the system, and
are only there for you to peruse to look for anomalies that might
indicate security problems or other issues with the system. As such
deleting all the logs won't affect anything, though you may want to
reboot afterwards (in case a running program has open a file you
deleted, which might make it unhappy).

The files are possibly refusing to be deleted because the act of
deleting them causes a line to be written to the log, thereby creating
it again (eg. using 'sudo rm' to delete the files will add a line to
/var/log/auth.log listing the command run). I'm assuming you're not
getting any error messages, the files just aren't 'going'.

Either way, the only reason deleting the log files was suggested was
to save time in copying data across to your new /var partition, and to
save some disk space that was being held up storing useless log files
aka 'crud'. If you can't seem to delete some files I wouldn't worry.

Cheers,
Patrick

-- 
http://www.labyrinthdata.net.au