[cobalt-users] [RaQ 3] Var Partition Full Warning for newbies

[Wayne Sagar <wsagar@xxxxxxxx>]

After finally finding out (I hope) what was causing my telnet access to fail and also finding out what is involved in the process of fixing it, once it goes the way it did... (var partition full... full of error logs mostly) which apparently is going to involve removing the drive from the RaQ, mount it in on another unix machine, clear the disk space and reinstall it in the RaQ .. all of this, hopefully without trashing the entire disk... 

My question/thought is why didn't Cobalt put a warning *somewhere* in the documentation for those of us who were unaware of the problem? It would seem that this is a bomb waiting to go off on ANY RaQ that has an administrator who does not know that he/she needs to manually clean the files periodically... or learn to set up a cron process to do it for them. 

The server has pre-setup log rotate functions for many of the logs within it.. but in /var/logs... there are several that appear to have been logging away merrily since the machine was set up... Mine, in particular, is full of the "cgi-wrap not found" errors, apparently caused by linux looking for the wrapper somewhere other than where it is and not finding it, prior to actually finding it, where it actually is located on the RaQ...

Since there is no warning, if you are a "newbie" like myself, unaware of the potential for your system to become almost totally unaccessible... go in and clean those error logs once in a while or you could get bit like I presently am.. No idea of what this will cost... Since no price was discussed and the machine is rented, advertised as not needing any unix knowledge to run it.. I'm not sure that whatever I see on the bill I will simply decline to pay... "THEIR" machine broke.. I only rent it... suppose this will not work in reality but I'll sure try it..

Wayne Sagar
(domain withheld due to paranoia about hackers watching this list:)