What happens if /var is full ?????

[Saurabh Chadha]

Hi,

I have the following problem. What would happen if

the /var partition on the workstation is full. And is

there any sys admin commands or cron that are run on

the system.

Thanks for your help and time.

Saurabh.

sau...@nortel.com

[Barry Margolin]

In article <360666...@bnr.ca>, Saurabh Chadha <sau...@bnr.ca> wrote:
>I have the following problem. What would happen if
>the /var partition on the workstation is full. And is

Some things would stop working. For instance, you won't be able to print
because /var/spool/lpd won't have room. You might not be able to send mail
because /var/spool/mqueue will be full. Logging will stop because
/var/adm/messages can't grow. If /var/tmp is on the /var partition,
programs that try to create temp files there will fail.

>there any sys admin commands or cron that are run on
>the system.

Is there something missing in this system? Are you asking whether there
are cron jobs that automatically clear up space in /var? There might be a
cron job to clean out old files in /var/tmp, or perhaps to compress
/var/adm/messages periodically (but this won't work if /var is full when it
runs, because while it's compressing it needs to keep the original around).

P.S. Double-spacing and indenting postings is really annoying.

--
Barry Margolin, bar...@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.

[Saurabh Chadha]

Thanks for the reply.
Let me clarify some more. Well do system adminstrators preodically go
into the var partition and clear out thr files or there are some cron
jons running. I found 2 the /etc/cron.d/logchecker cron would rotate the
cron log only if the 'ulimit' is not unlimited does that mean it allows
this file to grow till var runs out of disk space. The other one is
/usr/lib/newsyslog which rotates the /var/adm/messages files.
Also does the system clean the /var directory at boot up time.

Regards,
Saurabh.

[ra...@world.std.com]

In article <36068E...@bnr.ca>, Saurabh Chadha <sau...@bnr.ca> wrote:
>Thanks for the reply.
>Let me clarify some more. Well do system adminstrators preodically go
>into the var partition and clear out thr files or there are some cron
>jons running. I found 2 the /etc/cron.d/logchecker cron would rotate the
>cron log only if the 'ulimit' is not unlimited does that mean it allows
>this file to grow till var runs out of disk space. The other one is
>/usr/lib/newsyslog which rotates the /var/adm/messages files.
>Also does the system clean the /var directory at boot up time.

Most of us use a cron job to flush the /tmp, /var/tmp, and /usr/tmp locations
depending on local policies.

Overflowing /tmp can cause a *LOT* of problems.