makewhatis / updatedb

[Rick Stevens]

karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
> I have a RHv8.0 system used for hot backups so NFS is active to and from
> an IBM AIX system.
> 
> Over the weekend, updatedb (cron.daily/makewhatis) started on Friday,
> Saturday and Sunday, but never finished. I was out of disk space this
> morning and since it's also used as our print server, no one could print
> from our main business system because its spooler went down (another story
> for another time).

makewhatis and updatedb have nothing to do with each other.  makewhatis
generates the database for the "man -k" or "appropos" commands, updatedb
generates the database for the "which" and "whereis" commands.

> What can cause updatedb to continue running and not finish? Could it be
> the NFS filesystems? They've been mounted for months with no problems.

It could be.  You may have a recursive directory loop or something in
there.

It depends on what changed on the filesystems it's checking.  You may
need to use the "-e" option to exclude certain directories or the "-f"
option to exclude filesytem types, e.g.

	updatedb -f nfs

to exclude NFS volumes.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-              Careful!  Ugly strikes 9 out of 10 people!            -
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