On Friday, Sep 10, 2004, at 21:59 Australia/Sydney, Frank B. Scholl 
wrote:

> a day ago, i did not know which device that was. i digged a bit and 
> remarked, that /dev/sd0 is 51g in size. its the device from a 
> occassionally used usb enclosed harddrive. the device is plugged out 
> since, hm, lets say 3 days, but even with a reboot in between, 
> something writes to that device although it is not there anymore. if i 
> MAKEDEV all devices from new, well, the problem seems to be solved at 
> first, but even if i do not plug in my harddisk, sd0 gets large again.

Is it really "/dev/sd0"? Normally, /dev will contain sd0[a-p], with no
plain "sd0". I'm guessing some errant root process is creating and
writing a /dev/sd0 as a plain file...

A classic example is tar'ing your system to tape, and mistyping the
device name... instant big file that fills up root - maybe after
many successful runs (one reason a 4 MB root fs is nice on AIX, it
fills up fast, and stops apparent "successful" backups to bad tape
device names :) ).

Cheers,
--
stix