Oh my god, i can’t even tell you how angry i am! I spent the whole day coding one file, and now guess what: it is GONE because my root partition was full. Holy crap, who decided to split / and /home ? And whats about a warning if less than 1 megabyte is left on ROOT?
What’s the best way to free some space on / ?
My df looks like this:
I have a hard drive with some space left. I can partition it with some ext3, do i have to do so and mount it anywhere i need space? I have a growing mysql database running, how can i tell mysql to use a hard drive with some freaking space left?
It’s disgusting, i just saw 10GB for root and 49GB for /home. / is used 100% and /home 49%.
What the heck are you thinking? Users wont install anything, because it’s all included per default?
You could try to work out where the space is going with du on various directories. But 8GB was too small to begin with. The installer normally allocates 20GB I believe. Maybe it saw that you had limited free space.
You could move your mysql data files to a different Linux partition. Easiest way would be to copy them to /home and then replace the original directory with a symlink:
(Shutdown mysql)
cp -a /var/lib/mysql /home
mv /var/lib/mysql /var/lib/oldmysql
ln -s /home/mysql /var/lib/mysql
(Start up mysql, check that it's working fine)
rm -fr /var/lib/oldmysql
that decision was made (or not) by the person who did the initial
install…
whoever that was had the option to set up partitions any way s/he
wanted, OR accept the default that the script suggested…
splitting / from /home facilitates an easy path to do a clean upgrade
to the next version of openSUSE because the system partition can be
wiped and /home (collecte/originated data) remain untouched…
if your “growing mysql database” was in your /home, while the
mysql engine were in root’s system, then all would have been
well…right?
> And whats about a warning if less than 1 megabyte is left on ROOT?
the administrator can set that up too…but, 1 meg is FAR too small a
margin for many…so, that certainly should NOT be the default… i
personally start getting busy when i hit about 66% full…
warning? sure, you can even have the system send an email to your
Blackberry saying you have XX GB or XX% left on any partition…most
all things are possible on Linux…but, not set by default because one
size does NOT fit all…
and, when you spend “the whole day coding one file” always remember
this old truth: “Back up early, and often.” which i learned from an
successful writer of science fiction–these days i find an SD card is
easy…)
Already before SUSE/openSUSE did so, I decided to put /home on a separate partition. Next step was to put it on a separate partition on a separate disk, again next step was a 2 disk RAID. Ever since SUSE 8.0 i’ve kept the same user account, same home, whilst installing every single new release.
I haven’t used SuSE in some time, but this isn’t SuSE specific. /opt /tmp, /usr, /var and /home are always going to be the largest directories mounted under /.
YaST caches updates in /var. That alone will eat up a great deal of space. When compiling software, writes are done in /tmp. Depending on the size of the program and what’s needed when compiling, that too can chew up available space.
Typically, when installing, I give each of these directories their own partition and make them large enough to prevent them from filling up. I also clean out my /var/cache periodically.
My first recomendation would be to clean out /var/cache(or where ever YaST puts rpm’s). That should clear up quite a bit of space. Especially if you did a net install. All of the rpm’s used in the install are likely sitting in there, doing nothing but taking up space.
Next time you decide to install any distribution, give some thought to what you might be doing with it in the future.
My typical partitioning scheme follows.
/boot 500MB(far more than necessary)
/ 1GB
/opt 5GB(if installing KDE)
/tmp 10GB(fork bombs etcetera get contained and can’t kill the rest of /)
/usr 10GB(lots of room for more software)
/var 10GB(Keeps updates from raping / if I get lax in my maintenance)
/home Whatever space is left on the drive.
me too (put /home on a different partition)…and, later also put it
on a different drive (when space started getting short)…
but, then i bought a newer, bigger, FASTER and quieter drive and put
/home and / back on the same drive…and, unhooked the old one (to
save electricity, noise, heat, etc)…
–
MultiplePersonality
[and now hook the old one back in to backup /home !]
Now that i’m very satisfied with my SSD in the laptop, I’m going to buy another one, for my server/workplace. The root will be on the SSD, /var and /tmp on a separate 40 GB 10k rpm SATAII disk.
Ok, it’s probably a good idea to split things, but in my case the plan just backfired, and i wasted a day coding. It was my own fault, and the next time my editor tells me it can’t save stuff i just save everything somewhere “save”.
Now i mounted 26GB from a different harddrive to the place i usually save my code to, and since it most likely will never save anything else than plaintext code, i can write for a very long time whatever i want.
save electricity
Does a single harddrive really matter? I’m not that expert in such things, but i believe the difference is negligible.
Rule of thumb is that 1W 24 hours a day is roughly $1-2/year at current prices and also depending on where you live. A modern HD uses perhaps 5-10W. If you are only using your computer occasionally, I wouldn’t worry about it. But if you are building lots of always-on servers, or planning a new computer, it makes sense to reduce the number of disks.
First, I am largely an appliance user when it comes to Linux. I can make a DOS machine do pretty well anything I want, but with Linux, I am about as aware of the commands as I was with DOS during my first month.
Sure, I will chase down a missing codec or find a file a program needs to function, but I’ve no idea what to program in the terminal mode to get the system to do what I want.
It seems to me that everything is going to ROOT. There is even a copy of the home folder is there and it seems to have a copy of everything that is suppose to be in the other partition. More over, I’d like to load up a few graphic intensive games, but they seem to load into ROOT.
I end out with 2 megs for a swap file. 20 megs for the ROOT and 49 megs that are largely idle.
Is there something I can type into the terminal or some program I can use that will cause new programs to load into the larger partition?
Perhaps another BIN directory? - Something? Any hope?
I got the warning from YaST software manager.
So I decided to move /usr to a different partition. I mounted the new partition as /media/usr for the time being.
However, FSView shows that /usr is 3,6_GB and Dolphin says it is going to copy 6,2_GB!
What is going on? Why such a discrepancy?
Please stop re-opening old threads, start a new one instead. If others, like me, open it, the first page opens, I see the date, go back, since the thread is too old. Many others will do so too, thus you will miss a lot of attention for your problem.
yecril71pl wrote:
> I got the warning from YaST software manager.
> So I decided to move /usr to a different partition. I mounted the new
> partition as /media/usr for the time being.
> However, FSView shows that /usr is 3,6_GB and Dolphin says it is
> going to copy 6,2_GB!
> What is going on? Why such a discrepancy?
>
>
wow…did you know that “/usr” has nothing whatsoever to do with you,
as a user? except of course that it contains all the system
administration executables…and, if you actually moved /usr to
/media/usr i’m not sure what would happen, other than total catastrophe…
if you root is full you need to find out why…my guesses are:
/temp is full (do NOT go in there and delete stuff…Linux uses some
of those files), or
/var/log is full because you have something BAD going on constantly
which is being logged…
by the way, if you were to try the old windows trick of rebooting,
hoping the badness goes away…i don’t guess you can log in again…
One could move anything anywhere, but that’s not a solution. The problem is your root partition is too small. Do you have any idea on how to do this, without borking your system?
How large is your /tmp ?
yecril71pl wrote:
> My root is full and most of its content is in /usr. So I thought moving
> the contents of /usr to a dedicated partition would solve the problem.
moving /usr to /media/usr does nothing to help you because
BOTH of those places are STILL in the root partition…
there is (most likely) nothing in /usr you can do without
everything needing anything in /usr will stop working if you move it…
now, back to the problem: we need to know why your root is suddenly full?
so, do these in a user terminal and copy paste them back to here:
du / | sort -nr | less
df --print-type
find / -type f -size +10M