Re: [cobalt-users] root login failure and /var at 100%

[Rik Thomas <rikt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Bruce Timberlake wrote:

> David Liu wrote:
> > 
> > folks-
> > 
> > i've got a raq2 that has its /var directory at 100% capacity (i did a df -h).
> > 
> > and i can't su to root. just to be sure it wasn't a password-forgetfulness
> > problem, i pressed the password reset switch on the back of the machine.
> > still... i can't login as root, only as admin and the various users..
> > 
> > based on the cobalt site, they tell me to do a restore if i get into this
> > situation. now, there MUST be some way to flush out, for example, the huge
> > log files that are sitting in the /var directory so that i can get back in
> > as root and do what i need to do.
> > 
> > any thoughts?
> 
> About all you can do is find a file owned by admin in the var partition
> and delete it. That should free up some room so you can su to root. 
> 
> As a hedge against this problem in the future, it's a useful trick to
> make a 100K or so junk file in /var that's owned by admin.
> 
> If you have access to the RaQ, you could also pull out the HD and mount
> it as a secondary drive in another Linux box that you do have root
> access on, and manually remove some files that way.

Wow bad advice.  I guess you could do that.  Basically since you have 
physical access to the machine you can shut down the RAQ and take the hard 
drive out and put attach it to another linux machine.  Mount the hard 
drive in linux, then just move the log files to another partition if y ou 
want to save them.  Or just delete them. Put that hard drive back in it's 
orginal home and bring the machine back up, next you will want make a 
directory to move all of your log files to and then link them back to 
/var/log.

If you ahve questions contact me directly.


-- 
Rik Thomas 
rikt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://SmartBackups.com
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