Root HDD being filled up by a mystery!

[scottbouch-com]

4.1G    journal
5.7G    syslog
31G    syslog.1

Ouch! Something is pushing lots of crap into your logs. Making log files smaller often means there's some sort of problem in some programs and the logs are filling due to it. Time to watch the end of the syslog file as messages are added and track down the issues.

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

Turns out to be Zoneminder writing a LOT to syslog... I have found settings to stop it doing so. Every time a spider's web blew in the wind, the Ubuntu syslog was recording the event!

I still have a big problem with the Zoneminder SQL file, but I need the ZM forum to tell me how to fix that.

Thanks for the Ubuntu support, much appreciated!!

[TheFu]

I have 6 TB of media, but I suppose it's down to the number of items, ie: TV series will require more lines in a database than one film.

I'm afraid to say how much TV and movies I've recorded over the decades. Probably 5x that much. Plex was eating over 100G for metadata even with thumbnails and "optimization" disabled. I switched to Jellyfin and it uses ...

Filesystem                                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/WDBLK_8T-jellyfin                 22G  9.6G   11G  48% /var/lib/jellyfin

Very little. Under 10G. That is for 35K+ photos, 400G+ of music, and all the video/TV/Movies. Note how I have a separate LV just for jellyfin metadata? Split that off when I was using Plex and it kept filling up the disk, crashing the server. When I migrated to Jellyfin, just seemed like a good idea to keep the storage separate.

[scottbouch-com]

Just looked up Jellyfin... turns out I started using Emby at about the same time that Jellyfin was first released, but I have only heard of it today through this thread here.

Back in circa 2018 I was previously using Plex, but wanted a more open-source alternative so switched to Emby.

Jellyfin reads as a little more down the FLOSS route though, so I may give it a go, as privacy is important to me, but I need to see how good the apps are for smart TV, android devices etc.. Last thing I want to do is upset the family again when they can't use the wonderful services I provide.... Such as when ZM killed Emby this week by filling up my HDD... Honestly you provide a service that works perfectly for 364 days of the year, as soon as there's one hiccup they start saying "Why can't we just use Netflix and Spotify like everybody else?" And round we go again with the conversation about privacy and big data, and countryside limitations of broadband speeds.

[TheFu]

Jellyfin isn't perfect. There are lots of issues with it, but if those issues don't matter to you, great. I like it because it works with my network OTA TV tuners without any addons. They support just 1 brand - Silicon Dust - no others. But Silicon Dust tuners are excellent and I've had them long before switching to Plex or Jellyfin.

For DRM stuff, we have a Roku. Roku isn't available world wide, but I just got tired of streaming services breaking with my preferred playback devices. I seldom use the Jellyfin system to watch anything. It is basically a storage, media, and VM server that I could put into a closet with a power cable and ethernet cord. For playback, I use raspberry pis running OSMC with the Jellyfin addon and an Android tablet as the media controller and sometimes viewer. I've hated the Plex app interface since about 3 minutes after trying it out. I much prefer the Kodi interface for playback. Captions don't disappear when playback is paused like on Plex. Plus there's zero privacy with Plex. I considered emby, but I'll pick F/LOSS over proprietary almost every time. It is a personality flaw, I know.

[ajgreeny]

The biggest problem i found with jellyfin, which may not matter to you, is that it will not work with or show my large library of photos.
All other media-servers I've looked at were fine for this including DLNA and Emby which is a surprise to me as jellyfin was forked from Emby.

I realise there are other ways to show photos which might be OK for me but other family members feel that is very annoying abe expect everything to appear in the Emby library. If jellyfin added that I would move to it immediately but as things are it will remain Emby for me.

[TheFu]

I honestly haven't looked too much at photos in jellyfin.

I tend to use feh to show slideshows and only if the other people demand it.

Just looked and Jellyfin doesn't have a content type for photos at all. Got an update this morning, so I'm on the latest. Googled the jellyfin documentation and it says that photos aren't a supported content type, but that in a mixed library, they will be shown. The official documentation specifically says

Use of the mixed library type is currently discouraged due to unreliable metadata results. We encourage the use of the dedicated library types.

so it isn't recommended. I'll stick with feh.

Photos are stored on read-only NFS here, so any client can view them anyway. I'm positive that Nextcloud has access, so everyone in the house can view them from any device already if they want a fancy GUI.

[ajgreeny]

Yes, I saw that info about mixed library but still could not get it to work properly, hence sticking with Emby as my full media-server.

I do sometimes also use minidlna which is fine for photos and much smaller in terms of the metadata it requires, at least in my library, but that may be because of the small amount of metadata I want for the photos; all I want is to show them on my smart TV.

[TheFu]

... much smaller in terms of the metadata it requires, at least in my library, but that may be because of the small amount of metadata I want for the photos; all I want is to show them on my smart TV.

I don't trust outside DBs with my metadata. I put photo metadata into the directory structure and EXIF.

[mike.berkley@gmail.com]

I would suggest using `lsof` to look for temporary files that have been deleted, but are still in use.

How does one easily clean up temporary files after a program? If the program exits abnormally, leftover files are not removed, so they are left on the hard disk.
Let me introduce the `unlink()` call. In your program, you `open()` the file as usual, but then you `unlink()` the file's name from the directory structure. You have a valid open file descriptor that the kernel honours, so you can continue to read and write to the file as much as you need. When your program exits, even aborts, the file space is automatically freed. There is no filesystem corruption.

I suspect that some of your programs are using "(deleted)" files, and for some reason, one of them is using more space than it used to. You can search for them with:

lsof / | egrep 'REG.*(deleted)' | grep -v /memfd | less

This command looks for programs using REG (regular) files in the root filesystem.
On my laptop, I found that firefox, chrome, tmux and KDE were all using deleted files for temporary storage.

[sgt-mike]

Not to distract shift this thread.
I would like to thank everyone whom has responded to the OP's Post.
Had a similar occurrence with a headless server, I used what folks posted to diagnose the OP's issue.
This post helped me to resolve my issue.
So again Thank you