Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 15:33:11 -0600 From: Eric F Crist <ecrist@secure-computing.net> To: Olaf Greve <o.greve@axis.nl> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How to clear an improperly unreferenced file in multi-user mode? Message-ID: <6CD8B2FF-1CA2-4F98-979B-E4947519A00D@secure-computing.net> In-Reply-To: <436A09E9.5070905@axis.nl> References: <436A09E9.5070905@axis.nl>
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On Nov 3, 2005, at 7:00 AM, Olaf Greve wrote: > Hi, > > When doing some maintenance on my fall-back server I ran into > something weird. When running df it turned out /var was for 90% > full. I then manually deleted some files (as root over SSH), > amongst which the 'maillog' logfiles in /var/log, I also killed > sendmail (as it was generating the big log files, and at present I > don't need to run it on that machine), and just to be sure I > created a new 'maillog file of 0 length. > > So far so good, but after removing the maillog files and performing > another df call, the available size had not quite dropped as much > as expected and as should. DU reports the proper amount of disk > usage, so I performed an fsck. > ... > Now, of course one way to get rid of that big sucker is to boot the > machine in single user mode and run fsck again, however, the box is > nowhere near me and I cannot go down to the city where the machine > is anytime soon (besides: this is far from an urgent issue). So, I > was wondering about a thing: rather than doing a remote reboot and > hope that fsck will clear it up in the booting process (if it does > that at all, that is), I was wondering if there's a way to fix this > when running in multi user mode. > > Does anyone know how (if possible) to achieve this, or do I have to > reboot the machine in single user mode after all? I think that if you run a du -hd2 / you'll see that there's probably a bunch of crap in /var/ftp. I found this when I mistakenly enabled anonymous FTP. There were a much of random-sized binaries killing my hard drive. ----- Eric F Crist Secure Computing Networks http://www.secure-computing.net
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