The last few days Ive had trouble logging in as user, only root would work until i viewed to error log to discover some odd ‘requested theme stated twice’ fixed. but looking at that I discovered my usually copious 9.5 gig / drive had less than 50mb left, HUH?
Using the ‘file size view’ I discovered a file in var/log/ entitled networkmanager that was over 5 gigs. there were other NM files stated as .log and older zip or tar logs, but this one had no ‘.log’ or anything. worried my computer would freeze up as soon as i do anything that will fill my /tmp dir, I deleted said file and regained only a few mb. What? Now, roughly 12 hours later, BOOM! I’ve got 5.7gig free again.
It’s quite an old question, but I only saw it today, and since it still
appears unanswered, I’ll have a go.
Am 24.09.2008 21:46 schrieb osbie:
> The last few days Ive had trouble logging in as user, only root would
> work until i viewed to error log to discover some odd ‘requested theme
> stated twice’ fixed. but looking at that I discovered my usually copious
> 9.5 gig / drive had less than 50mb left, HUH?
>
> Using the ‘file size view’ I discovered a file in var/log/ entitled
> networkmanager that was over 5 gigs. there were other NM files stated as
> .log and older zip or tar logs, but this one had no ‘.log’ or anything.
> worried my computer would freeze up as soon as i do anything that will
> fill my /tmp dir, I deleted said file and regained only a few mb. What?
> Now, roughly 12 hours later, BOOM! I’ve got 5.7gig free again.
/var/log/networkmanager is the Network Manager’s log file. It doesn’t
have or need a “.log” suffix. It is held open by the Network Manager
process in order to write to it. If you delete a file that’s still
open by some process then the space is not freed immediately because
the process might still access it. Only when the process closes the
file is the disk space freed. For log files, this normally happens
during the daily log rotation which is done automatically by cron.
So everything is quite normal as far as it goes.
But your Network Manager must have had some serious trouble if it
wrote 5 GB of log entries, and you should watch that log file to see
if it grows excessively again. You might also want to have a look
inside and check what it is that Network Manager is complaining so
verbosely about, and perhaps fix it.
As an aside, that kind of incident is why I advocate putting /var on
a separate disk partition. /var is home to many files that have a
tendency to grow, and if your root partition gets full your system
becomes largely unusable.