[nmglug] saving disk space

[BrianO'Keefe]

All good advice and thanks! I was joking about my "friends" box, its'
mine-just getting back at Andres.
So I already have logrotate installed and I can run that manually as I
rarely have my box running at that hour either.
I ran your command Mars, "tail" and that big log file is pure:
 tail -n100 /var/log/mol.1.log
***** SIGNAL 13 [Broken pipe] in thread main-thread *****
***** SIGNAL 13 [Broken pipe] in thread main-thread *****
***** SIGNAL 13 [Broken pipe] in thread main-thread *****
<snip>
***** SIGNAL 13 [Broken pipe] in thread main-thread *****
***** SIGNAL 13 [Broken pipe] in thread main-thread *****

I had posted way back that once I was running Mac-on-Linux and I watched
in horror as all of my disk space was consumed while I frantically tried
to shut down before it was all used. I didn't succeed and I had to boot
into OS X and move some files from my Linux partition to a remote drive.
I didn't even have enough space to boot into a terminal. Makes using MOL
kinda scary!

Another question, can anyone help in installing Lightning for
thunderbird from source? I had gotten Sunbird installed but have screwed
that all up and haven't had any luck reinstalling it from source. the
mozilla build instructions are not easy for me and they don't use
standard "/configure && make && make install". I would really like to
get a calendar back.
Sunbird won't start as it can't find the mozilla runtime library.

thanks again!
Brian


Mars DeLapp wrote:
> BrianO'Keefe wrote:
>> A quick and easy one-
>> Is it safe to delete /var/log files? I would assume it is but I wanted
>> to get some expert advice.
>
> In some cases it is NOT safe to delete log files. The risk comes from
> the possibility of the log file getting recreated with the wrong
> permissions and allowing everyone read access. "it might be a security
> hole if everybody is able to read auth.* messages as these might
> contain passwords."
>
> You could install logrotate
>
> logrotate normally runs as a cron job at 6:25 am for your standard
> daily cron jobs. If you have your computer on at that time, it runs.
> If you don't have the box on, it will not run. I noticed on this
> particular box of mine, the last time I was working at 6:25 am was in
> February.
>
> You can run logrotate by hand:
>
> # logrotate -fv /etc/logrotate.conf
>
> But really, the first thing you should do is go look at that huge log
> file and find out what is going on. You should use 'tail' for looking
> at big huge multi-megabyte log files.
>
> # tail -n100 /var/log/biglogfile.log
>
> Mars
>