[Novalug] yum problem

[Kevin Dwyer]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2007 at 10:55:56AM -0700, Beartooth wrote:
> 	I went down and tried running gparted and qtparted on 
> that machine. Qtparted won't launch from the menu, but does using 
> "qtparted &" as roon -- and then gives various error messages. It 
> does, however, provide a graphical indication of what is where.
> 
> 	Gparted runs fine -- at least for information purposes.
> 
> 	But they gave quite different size numbers.
> 
> 	Neither one showed a separate partition for /var.
> 
> 	Both offered ways to resize or delete a partition. I 
> tried all four against the XP partition, sdb6. (Qtparted has the 
> virtue of showing a Windows logo against windows partitions.)

Are you sure that your problem is that the partition isn't large enough?
(OK, we could argue that, but..) What I would suggest is to find the
large files that have shown up and clean them out.  Obviously something
is eating your disk space.  I would suggest that you approach this
problem as if you have no more room on the disk to resize partitions.

I would recommend this rough outline:

1. cd /
2. du -s * | sort -n    # This will take some time
3. If the last item from the output of 2 is a directory,
     cd to the last item
       3.1. goto step 2
   else
     examine this file and decide if it's something you can delete, and
     if it's something worth deleting (i.e. large, perhaps many MBs)

       3.2.  If you haven't freed up enough space, backtrack up the tree
         and repeat step 2 with the next to last item (which is probably
         the new last item if you deleted something)

This is going to take you into the directories in the tree which are
using the most disk space.  You can then decide if you should delete
some of the files there.  Obviously, you'll have to use some discretion
and not just randomly delete system files.  But you'll probably find
some large files that are no longer necessary.

-kpd