[wplug] reclaiming disk space...

[James O'Kane]

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, Mike wrote:

> Threw another low end system together with a small drive in it..
> trying to free up some space by removing unneeded packages..
>
> After I finished up with the package manager I still show the same
> space I had before as free with DF.
>
> A check with RPM shows the packages are not installed..


If these were packages that had running processes, and for whatever reason
didn't stop the process, those processes could be holding drive space due
to open filehandles. You can either hunt them down and stop them, or
reboot. I'm also not positive this happens with any rpms.

There is an option to rpm that will repackage rpms when you remove them.
It puts them into /var/spool/repackage

Depending on the purpose of the machine and assuming you're using ext2/3,
you might want to adjust the reserved disk percentage. Take a look at the
man page for tune2fs and see the -m option. The reserved blocks are for
root to still be able to write things in the event that various users fill
the disk. Root would still be able to edit config files, etc and keep the
machine running. That might not matter to you if this is a test machine.
And on some large partitions, the default 5% starts to get fairly large.


Another thing I like to do if I'm really, really hurting for space is to
periodically remove everything under /usr/share/doc. This will cause some
rpm operations to complain because you've deleted files it associates with
part of some package, but they are usually README files or similar.

I also like to use 'du -smc * |sort -n' to help find large directories and
files.


-james