[SOLVED] Server full - conflicting views - how do I detect the cause?

[altonbr]

Right now I have a 4.7GB Ubuntu Server running inside VMware.

I copied over an Apache virtualhost file, edited it but couldn't re-save it. The server said it's full.

Sure enough I ran df -h and it said I have 4.7GB all used up.

I ran Baobab ("Disk Usage Analyzer") over SSH and it returned that I only have 1.6GB used up.

What can I do to find the cause of this problem or how can I remove some unneeded files?

This is all I know of so far to clear up some space...
sudo apt-get clean

[astrotech226]

Try a disk usage report on each of the directories of root and let's see the output of it. Interesting to see if they add up to 4.7G.

sudo du -sh /*

[justleen]

slighty nicer way of getting the du of /
(do a sudo -i or su - first)
for dirs in `ls -1`; do du -hs $dirs; done

root@leen-laptop:/# for dirs in `ls -1`; do du -hs $dirs; done
4.8M bin
18M boot
0 cdrom
116K dev
9.8M etc
52M home
4.0K initrd
0 initrd.img
155M lib
16K lost+found
^[[D63G media
4.0K mnt
4.0K opt
0 proc
148K root
6.3M sbin
4.0K srv
0 sys
172K tmp
1.8G usr
296M var
0 vmlinuz

[altonbr]

EDIT:

I just posted my results here, but upon further investigation of running
for dirs in `ls -1`; do du -hs $dirs; done
In /, then /var, then /var/lib, I found that /var/lib/amavis/tmp is taking up 2.8GB!

Thank you, thank you, thank you for that script! I saved that one for sure!

[justleen]

glad to be of help!

[nab]

well, I ran into a similar problem:

Up to now I used allways baobab to clean up my hard disk and locate my space wasters, but this time baobab missed about 3 GB. (total space used 7.2, used in / 4.2)

With your script I found the missing 2.9 GB in the root directory!

Thanks a lot!
Niko

[altonbr]

That script needs to escape spaces, such as when I run it on customers' Windows partitions:
$ for dirs in `ls -1`; do du -hs $dirs; done
1.8M 31f292e6e12d224bfd7a
52K 75e594bafc3c0501a8507d72fe54
du: cannot access `ACS': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Backup': No such file or directory
12M AUDIO
0 AUTOEXEC.BAT
0 CONFIG.SYS
268K Config.Msi
du: cannot access `Documents': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `and': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Settings': No such file or directory
304M Downloads
0 IO.SYS
0 MSDOS.SYS
du: cannot access `My': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Shared': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Folder': No such file or directory
48K NTDETECT.COM
du: cannot access `Program': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Files': No such file or directory
856M RECYCLER
684K StubInstaller.exe
du: cannot access `System': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Volume': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `Information': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `WINDOWS/RegisteredPackages/{3FDF25EE-E592-4495-8391-6E9C504DAC2B}$BACKUP$/System/setup_wm.exe': Input/output error
du: cannot access `WINDOWS/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v1.1.4322/mscorwks.dll': Input/output error
6.8G WINDOWS

[astrotech226]

That script needs to escape spaces, such as when I run it on customers' Windows partitions:

Try what I posted originally. You don't need to escape anything to make it work:

du -sh *

[altonbr]

Hey, that works well too, but is there anyway to sort the numbers without using the -b (bytes) flag?

du -sb * | sort -n
...
3496348424 videos
4710272547 vmware
5062424540 my_documents
6803576371 music
8149764109 torrents
10345385339 my_videos
10493645115 my_photos
15285703828 software
17111556546 television
20032484056 operating_systems

It'd be nice if it could stay human readable.

[astrotech226]

What you have to do is do a "du -sk" and sort it so the size can be ordered correctly. Then, do a "du -sh" of each line returned. It's ugly, but this could be put in a script:

du -sk * | sort -n | awk -F'\t' '{print $2}' | xargs -ia du -sh "a"

[altonbr]

What you have to do is do a "du -sk" and sort it so the size can be ordered correctly. Then, do a "du -sh" of each line returned. It's ugly, but this could be put in a script:

du -sk * | sort -n | awk -F'\t' '{print $2}' | xargs -ia du -sh "a"

Wow. Saved that one for sure. I see what it's doing, albeit it's a little over my head. Fantastic!