> On Sunday 08 October 2006 09:06, radhika wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am running netbsd 3.0 on i386.
>> I  notice var is almost 50% of my 14G.
>> In var I noticed a backups directory with etc, and var in it.
>> What is the backups being used for?
>> How can I clean up var ie. remove old files without breaking anything.
>>
>> thanks,
>> Radhika
>
> /var/backups is used by /etc/security (see security.conf(5)) for more
> details.
> Basically, it's used to keep copies of vital files if they have changed.
> This should not be that large and I personally do not recommend deleting
> it.
> Especially considering we're talking about a 14G drive here and not
> something
> smaller than a gig where the few megs you would recover would really
> matter.
>
> You can try cleaning up /var/tmp  with
> find /var/tmp -atime +3 -exec rm {} \;
>
> That will delete any files not access within three days.  You can also
> delete
> old log files (those with .gz in /var/logs) that you don't need anymore.
>
> But the big thing is to locate where the space is going,  Try "du -k |
> sort -rn | head" for a good idea of where you should be looking.  The
> larger
> the directory or file the more you should look closely at it and see
> what's
> happening.  Once you know what is taking up the space, you will have a
> better
> idea of how to fix it and possibly prevent it from recurring.
>
> -Kevin
>

Kevin,

Thanks for your input. I tried doing the sort to see what was being
written where most and got this resut:
bash-3.1# du -k | sort -rn | head
16352   .
11258   ./db
9625    ./db/pkg
2698    ./log
1245    ./backups
750     ./spool
660     ./spool/clientmqueue
614     ./backups/etc
607     ./backups/work
396     ./db/pkg.refcount
bash-3.1#


It looks like my db directory is the culprit. This morning a releated
problem was because var was > 50% full, postfix started complaining with
error 452.

smtpd_check_size: blocks 1024 avail 14313 min_free 0 msg_size_limit 10240000
Oct  9 10:02:55 rootabega postfix/smtpd[6211]: NOQUEUE: reject: MAIL from
unknown[218.57.97.17]: 452 Insufficient system storage; proto=SMTP
helo=<aftertayst.com>
Oct  9 10:02:55 rootabega postfix/smtpd[6211]: warning: not enough free
space in mail queue: 14656512 bytes < 1.5*message size limit
Oct  9 10:02:55 rootabega postfix/smtpd[6211]: > unknown[218.57.97.17]:
452 Insufficient system storage
Oct  9 10:02:55 rootabega postfix/smtpd[6211]: watchdog_pat: 0x8082b48


I have currently set min_message_size=750000 and min_queue_free=2024000.

My question is to avoid further var being full problems, is there
something I can do to set the /var/db to point to another slice?

Thanks,
Radhika