My hard disk space has been gobbled up without me really installing much if anything. I had backups enabled and I disabled it before deleting the backups. Could they be sucking up all my disk space? I looked in my log directory and nothing in there is very big. I’ve done apt-get clean, auto clean, etc.
logrotate is the utility that automatically compresses old log files. You can also configure it to delete older logs. Edit the file /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 It will look like:
/var/log/apache2/*.log {
weekly
missingok
rotate 52
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
create 640 root adm
sharedscripts
postrotate
if /etc/init.d/apache2 status > /dev/null ; then \
/etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null; \
fi;
endscript
prerotate
if [ -d /etc/logrotate.d/httpd-prerotate ]; then \
run-parts /etc/logrotate.d/httpd-prerotate; \
fi; \
endscript
}
Add maxage 14 to delete logs older than two weeks.
Issue the command below to see what folder is using up most space
du -sh /*
That should give a summary of what folder is the largest. It won’t be an instant result, give the command time to run.
Thanks. It looks like my /var/log directory is 24GB. Inside that it claims apache2 is 24 GB but can’t seem to list its contents or change directory into it. The following is the contents of the /var/log directory.
alternatives.log dpkg.log.2.gz pm-powersave.log
alternatives.log.1 faillog pm-powersave.log.1
alternatives.log.2.gz fontconfig.log pm-powersave.log.2.gz
apache2 fsck samba
apt gpu-manager.log speech-dispatcher
auth.log hp syslog
auth.log.1 installer syslog.1
auth.log.2.gz kern.log syslog.2.gz
auth.log.3.gz kern.log.1 syslog.3.gz
auth.log.4.gz kern.log.2.gz syslog.4.gz
boot.log kern.log.3.gz syslog.5.gz
bootstrap.log kern.log.4.gz syslog.6.gz
btmp landscape syslog.7.gz
btmp.1 lastlog udev
cups lightdm ufw.log
dbconfig-common mysql ufw.log.1
dist-upgrade mysql.err ufw.log.2.gz
dmesg mysql.log ufw.log.3.gz
dmesg.0 mysql.log.1.gz ufw.log.4.gz
dmesg.1.gz mysql.log.2.gz unattended-upgrades
dmesg.2.gz mysql.log.3.gz upstart
dmesg.3.gz mysql.log.4.gz wtmp
dmesg.4.gz mysql.log.5.gz wtmp.1
dpkg.log mysql.log.6.gz Xorg.0.log
dpkg.log.1 mysql.log.7.gz Xorg.0.log.old
asb’s suggestion is a good one to consider if you’re struggling to keep a handle on log files, although a 24GB log file is a bit large…
What do you mean you can’t change directory to it? Is it giving an error?
What happens when you type
cd /var/log/apache2
ls -al
Perhaps the directory won’t let you list the contents unless you’re root? If you’re on ubuntu that means using sudo
cd /var/log/apache2
sudo ls -al
If you find the file thats massive and want to remove it, remove with the rm command
rm filename
Again, you’ll need to do this as root, which means using sudo
sudo rm filename
Linux doesn’t rely on file extensions as much as windows, so sometimes a file will be without an extension, which makes it appear as a directory. This also means you might confuse a directory for a file and try to edit it, wondering why it isn’t working. Using ls with some colour can help you with that.
ls --color
Directories usually show in dark blue, system links in light blue and files do not have any colour - they just show the standard console colour. Note: the –color command cannot be used as –colour, must be the American spelling.
Let me know any error messages you have, we’ll see if we can work it out :-)
I get:
-bash: cd: /var/log/apache2: Permission denied
when trying to cd to apache2
Weird
Try
sudo cd /var/log/apache2
You can append sudo to the start of commands to execute them as an administrator (root). Please be VERY careful about what you start as the root user, it can have massive security implications.