On Sun 01 Jul 2018 at 19:04:31 (-0400), The Wanderer wrote: > On 2018-07-01 at 18:43, David Wright wrote: > > > On Sun 01 Jul 2018 at 13:17:47 (-0700), Charlie Gibbs wrote: > > > >> I've been banging my head against the wall trying to compile > >> OpenSSL clients on my Jessie laptop (see my recent posting titled > >> "Can't link to OpenSSL on my laptop). I've decided to upgrade it > >> to Stretch like my desktop machine, which compiles these programs > >> successfully. However, "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" shows the > >> message: > >> > >> E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/. > >> > >> apt-get autoclean doesn't help; neither does apt-get clean. When > >> I tried apt-get autoremove, the upgrade started, but at 99% > >> completion it threw the message: > >> > >> Error writing to output file - write (28: No space left on device) > >> > >> Sure enough, / is full, with all the fun that that entails. > > > > It's worth knowing where the problem lies. I would type > > > > du -sh /[a-ln-z]*/ 2>/dev/null > > > > (I dodge m because /media has loads mounted under it; null avoids > > permissions clutter if you do this as a user.) > > Is there a reason you don't add '-x' to that, to skip recursing into > other filesystems? (Which would also avoid the need to omit /media.)
Habit. Slap my wrist, but I mount partitions on the internal disk onto mountpoints in / (rather than /media), and I'm usually interested in their usage as much as the rest. Also on my slowest two machines, I would omit /usr (even though it's not hived off: but I can't do anything about its size) as it takes too long to traverse it. Yes, for this use case, a more considered commandline might be du -hxd 1 /var 2>/dev/null (And it's habitual for me to do it as a user, but the OP probably wants accuracy and should run it as root.) BTW I don't think -x works if you're selecting directories by globbing as I do. > >> Is Jessie's default partitioning insufficient for Stretch, or have > >> I somehow filled up / with extraneous junk? Would I be better off > >> backing up /home, wiping the disk (e.g. with cfdisk) and starting > >> from scratch? (Probably - I should probably split /var into a > >> separate partition anyway.) > > > > A separate /home is more useful as it allows a fresh installation of > > the / partition that doesn't touch it. > > I generally do one partition each for /, /boot, /tmp, /home, and /var - > and formerly also /usr, but I understand that that's not supported > anymore. I sometimes also do one for /opt, depending on what I expect to > do with the system. I need to justify each one to myself before I'll add to the admin burden by making unnecessary splits¹. In turn: /home is a no-brainer. All my machines have two Debian systems sharing their home partition. Usually the two systems are different codenames. /boot is "essential" if you encrypt the system. I have only ever encrypted /home (beyond a trial), so I've no need. /tmp In the years when I had long uptimes (~400d was my maximum), this was of more importance. If / fills interactively, I know almost straight away (I get a false overheat alarm) so I just clean it up. /var Similar. The proportion of / taken up by logs is trivial now compared with running DOS and linux on a 2GB disk. But it makes good sense for a long-running server, as with /tmp. I shut down all my machines at bedtime. Currently my server might be running in a room at 90-100°F (we had 106°F outside last Thursday). > I've only filled up / once, on one system, so far as I recall - and it > was in fact due to /var/cache/apt/archives. The first time I login to a machine after rebooting, my startup files print a massaged df ; df -i and nag me if I haven't checked the disk for over three weeks. As for /var/cache/apt/archives, I push that problem onto my server by running apt-cacher-ng. On one or two occasions, I ran into problems there because the version running was too old for new-fangled files from apt-get update (which screws its expiration run). This made /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/ grow and grow (slowly). Currently it's at 13GB. ¹ I know, others might use LVM. Cheers, David.
