System crash - now shows "no space on device"

[Carruth, Rusty]

Unfortunately, once you've deleted /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog (and /var/log/kern*) any chance of knowing what happened is probably lost, because those logs contained the spewing that was either the cause of the failure, or the information about the failure. 

Next time I would advise booting on a standalone boot cd and taking a look at the log files above to see if it's something that you're going to need to 'worry about' (like a disk drive going bad).  Just for 'grins' you might want to check the 'S.M.A.R.T.' information to see if your drive is getting tired.

(Disclaimer - I did not read the entire thread, someone may have already said all this.  Sorry!)

Side note - why some variants of Linux have messages, syslog, and kern.log when they are ALMOST identical (and when things 'go bad' take 3x the disk space), I'm not sure.  I have noticed that Linux Mint only has syslog and not messages (haven't checked for kern)...  It may be possible to tune the assignemt of messages to files such that you minimize the duplication, but I've not felt the need to (even though there have been more than a few times that a disk drive 'going bad' has filled up the root partition here at work).

And yet another 'by the way' - this whole 'running out of space in /var' thing is why some people put /var into its own partition.

Rusty
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-
> discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of
> joe at actionline.com
> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 8:45 AM
> To: Main PLUG discussion list
> Subject: Re: System crash - now shows "no space on device"
> 
> 
> Thanks Lisa. Deleting some of the /var/log/messages files did free up
> enough space that I was able to boot into kde.  But questions remain:
> why
> did the system create about 3-gig of messages? And that only reduced
> the
> root partition from 12-gigs to 9-gigs when there is actually only 3.5-
> gigs
> of valid content in the root partition?
>