OpenSuse 11.4 hard free space decreases to zero without any running program

Question

I have a one-user linux OpenSuse 11.4 on my HP proliant server and I always connect to it with TightVCN. The server settings are:

core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority             (-e) 0
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 508283
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) 55311708
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority              (-r) 0
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 508283
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) 92324960
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

I had not this problem before but, recently, with or without any uses, the hard free space rapidly decreases until it reaches to zero (during less than 24 hours). There is no big file when this thing happens. Just free space finish and I do not know where it might have gone. There is not stable uses of free space, because when I restart it twice, It would comes back. When this declination starts the VNC connection losses without any warnings (Even, with no VNC connection this thing happens). It forced me to reset server manually. The first restarting restore VNC connection and the second restarting could restore the lost free space. This cycle never stops. Therefore, I would like to know how can I solve the problem?

Answer 1

I assume you mean harddisk free space is getting lower and lower. The only option for this to happen is that someone or something is writing to a file constantly. Usually the culprit is some misconfigured daemon.

Similar situation i've seen beeing pcsc-lite (cryptocards related) was set to do an excessive logging and firefox was constantly polling it. this resulted in being logged to the .xsession-errors. Which is rotated on GUI restart.

First things first:

• get yourself at least a bit familiar with ssh/openssh/PuTTY
• stop all gui (the login daemon should be enough (gdm))
• start connecting to the server via ssh and monitor status

In order to try and debug the issue the following (when it occurs) will help:

• get a list of the open files ( lsof > /tmp/list_of_open_files in terminal as root )
• look for large files ( find {/path/to/directory/} -type f -size +{size-in-kb}k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }' )