On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 05:28:59PM -0400, Russell Hires wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> Couldn't log into kde today, for lack of space in /var. After judicious use
> of "du -ah" I find that my syslog is roughly 200 MB, and my kern.log is 201
> MB. What's up with that? Is it safe to delete them? The first entries show
> June 24 or so in syslog, same for kern.log.
>
> Thanks for the advice!
>
> Russell
>
You sent three of these to the list. I'm guessing you weren't sure they
were going out.
Possibility 1: You have too much logging going on. That is, syslog is
getting filled with too much unnecessary stuff. This is controlled by
/etc/syslog.conf (or something similar). Unless you know what you're
looking at there, you may have to post it, because I can't tell you what
should and shouldn't be in there.
Possibility 2: You have a lot of stuff going on that shouldn't be. Check
the contents of the syslog to see what it's logging. You can do this
tail --lines=100 /var/log/syslog | less
to see what it says. Again, you may have to post some of this unless you
know what you're looking at (not all 100 lines, though).
Possibility 3: You don't have logrotate running, or it's not running
often enough. This is a program that backs up and zeroes out your syslog
file periodically. It also removes syslog files over a certain age.
Check for files like
/var/log/syslog.0
/var/log/syslog.1
/var/log/syslog.2
in your /var/log directory. Check their dates, and you can see the
period at which logrotate is running. You can also check your cron jobs
to see if logrotate is one of them. If not, install and set it up to
run. Logrotate is controlled by a file like /etc/logrotate.conf, which
is relatively self-explanatory.
As for kern.log, I dunno. Similar to syslog, I imagine.
HTH,
Paul
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