Ubuntu and space consumption
2009-Aug-16, Sunday 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ssurgulWow.
So, over the course of the last 3 days, I freed up over 90GB of space when I discovered that I was running about <4MB free on my main filesystem on the home server. Within hours, sometimes minutes, of freeing that up, I watched it all vanish again. When I ran the graphic disk usage analyzer, I saw only consumption in certain folders that are normally big anyway; no 'extra' use.
Convinced I had a hacker that was, once again, using my server as a file-dump-point (this happened when I was running an NT4 server WAY back in the day), I started scrounging for good, up-to-date firewall tools, sniffer/intrusion detection systems and whatnot. (Yes, I do use a graphical firewall constructor for iptables in Linux already; I just figured it was flawed. And yes, I had already downloaded snort and was getting ready to try and figure out how to get it configured for a MySQL implementation.) When I have 'the big project' due today for school, and I need to be focused on that, it's not entertaining. It adds to stress I didn't know I was already capped on.
When I realized that I wasn't running the display tool as 'root', I got that up and running properly, only to discover there was a HUGE usage (>350GB) in /var. Investigating, I found there were whole system backups dating back to April tucked in there. Checking the system's backup utility, I discovered that it had seemingly on its own been set to run automated backups and use the logrithmic analysis for when to remove backups. Obviously someone left out the critial "delete oldest data when system at zero resources!" logic.
Case solved, and backup set to manual again, rather than trusting the logic in the system. Sometimes computers seemingly being smarter than me is a very good thing. Sometimes, though, when simple checks aren't coded in, then it's pretty clear that having a system trying to outsmart me just causes problems.
So, over the course of the last 3 days, I freed up over 90GB of space when I discovered that I was running about <4MB free on my main filesystem on the home server. Within hours, sometimes minutes, of freeing that up, I watched it all vanish again. When I ran the graphic disk usage analyzer, I saw only consumption in certain folders that are normally big anyway; no 'extra' use.
Convinced I had a hacker that was, once again, using my server as a file-dump-point (this happened when I was running an NT4 server WAY back in the day), I started scrounging for good, up-to-date firewall tools, sniffer/intrusion detection systems and whatnot. (Yes, I do use a graphical firewall constructor for iptables in Linux already; I just figured it was flawed. And yes, I had already downloaded snort and was getting ready to try and figure out how to get it configured for a MySQL implementation.) When I have 'the big project' due today for school, and I need to be focused on that, it's not entertaining. It adds to stress I didn't know I was already capped on.
When I realized that I wasn't running the display tool as 'root', I got that up and running properly, only to discover there was a HUGE usage (>350GB) in /var. Investigating, I found there were whole system backups dating back to April tucked in there. Checking the system's backup utility, I discovered that it had seemingly on its own been set to run automated backups and use the logrithmic analysis for when to remove backups. Obviously someone left out the critial "delete oldest data when system at zero resources!" logic.
Case solved, and backup set to manual again, rather than trusting the logic in the system. Sometimes computers seemingly being smarter than me is a very good thing. Sometimes, though, when simple checks aren't coded in, then it's pretty clear that having a system trying to outsmart me just causes problems.