Hi Daniel, Interesting little trick there.
I'm still no wiser :))) but curious! The machine seems quite okay and has been on overnight. Dunno. Someone may have an idea as to what was happening. Till then I've another query which will be in the next post :) Regards, Patrick > Daniel Pittman <dan...@rimspace.net> > Thu, 25 Dec 2008 23:42:56 +1100 > > Well, I can't explain why you got the warning, or if it is a genuine > warning or a bug, but I can perhaps shed some light on a corner of Unix > that might explain things: > > Under Unix, if a process opens a file, then deletes it, without closing > the file, it remains in existence until the process exits. It can, for > example, continue to write to the file. > > One of the traditional ways to run out of space on a Unix machine, and > to confuse the heck out of a new sysadmin, is based on this: > > You start a process that, for some reason, spews a huge amount of junk > out, such as bogus warnings or over-verbose logging, and send that to a > file. > > Then, the new admin notices the huge file after a while and deletes it, > but the process doesn't close the file — it continues to write it in the > background. > > Give it a little time and the admin starts to wonder why there is only a > few percent of disk space free, but nothing shows up using it with du(1) > and friends... > > Worse, a reboot cures this — because as soon as the daemon stops running > the file system will free the file, returning the disk space to the free > pool... > > Regards, > Daniel > > -- Registered GNU/Linux User 368634 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
