/var Filesystem Space

[Gene Poole]

On Mon, 2006-12-04 at 08:29:46 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> First, you might want to see where the space is being consumed and see
> if there isn't some worthless stuff there...for example, I believe that
> until FC-5, it was standard for yum to 'cache' all the update rpm's
> which could take up a lot of space. You might want to try 'yum clean
> cache' or 'yum clean all' to see if that frees up some space.
>
> To see where the space is being consumed, try 'du -sh /var/*'
>
> In answer to your questions...
>
> 1. it depends upon what you are doing on the system.
>
> MySQL & PostgreSQL store their data in /var/lib
> Apache will use /var/www/
> Various mail programs will use /var/spool
>
> There is no single best answer to question 1
>
> 2. LVM allows you to add another drive or change partition sizing. I am
> gathering though that you have hard partitioned and not used LVM.
> Sometimes you can get away with bind mounting where there is space to
> another place where there isn't much space. For example, presume that I
> have space in /home that I can yield and I have a lot of data
> in /var/spool/mail that I would like to relocate...
>
> mkdir /home/mail
> mv /var/spool/mail /var/spool/mail-old
> mkdir /var/spool/mail
> cp -av /var/spool/mail-old /home/mail
> mount --bind /home/mail /var/spool/mail
>
> should sort of work (I'm doing this off the top of my head).
>
> Once you have this working and your data is available, then you could
> delete /var/spool/mail-old and add the bind mount to /etc/fstab

> Craig
----
Thanks! That was good information.  I've moved the yum cache to another
location for good.  The update went perfectly.

I might have come up with a basic 'rule of thumb'.  The initial updates,
with everything selected, came up to the size of a standard CD - 650MB
(actually 634MB exactly).  So if your /var filesystem doesn't have 750MB
available, don't even start the update until after that has been rectified.

Thanks Again,
Gene Poole