No room left to update system

[chippermon]

Hello,
There are new updates available for my system but when I use the Mageia updater it goes through the usual motions only to give me an error message that installation has failed. There is not enough space to allow the completion of the installation.

After searching the forums for a solution I was able to come up with this.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1742&p=12614&hilit=no+space+left+on+file+system#p12614

I suppose I will reinstall the system and just make the partition 20G or something like that. My question is, since the above link is a few years old....... is there a better way to do this now or is there a more preferred method to rectify this problem? I just don't want to open up a can of worms and be asking for help with an even bigger problem.

Thank you

[gohlip]

and just make the partition 20G or something like that.

Your Mageia is smaller than that? It's way too small (for Mageia) even without data in /home.

Suggest 30GB (at least) and that excludes whatever data you want to put into /home. (If you have a separate partition for data, then it's fine).

o urpme --auto-orphans
Above command will clean out old stuff you don't need and save quite a bit of space.
In this forum, everyone (except one other member) will tell you not to do it.
I've been doing it since I've used Mageia.
Just that you do this command after you have a fresh boot and there is nothing to update.
Some common sense will go a long way.

[chippermon]

okay. Well, I have a separate partition for data with plenty of space for sharing. When I installed Mageia it automatically gave me sda1 12 G. I used the command df in the console and it shows sda1 full.

Thanks for your input

[jiml8]

12G is certainly too small for a normal desktop Mageia install. That said, you might not really be out of space. Unless it has been fixed recently, the default Mageia install did not constrain the size of the log files created by the journal daemon, and we have seen many cases of multi-gigabyte journal files being in place.

Go to /var/log and look around to see what archived log files are there that are taking space and do not need to be there. Then go into /var/log/journal and see what is there. You will see a directory that is a long random string of letters and numbers. Enter that directory, and do an ls -l.

Note the size of the file(s) there. You probably will see some very large files that can be deleted.

I am not going to detail the right way to clean this up and how to constrain the size of the journal in the future, mainly because I forget how, would have to look it up myself, and don't have the time.

But I will bet you that if you look there and clean things up there, you will find you have enough space on your / partition to get by for awhile. Another place to look is in /var/cache. Given that this is cache, pretty much everything is fungible though you should probably exercise some discretion...don't delete any databases for instance.

[Lebarhon]

Hello,
You can see if a log is too big with the command:

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#du -a /var/log |sort -h

and delete it without any problem.

[isadora]

In addition you could have a look at the possibilities of log-rotation.
Type in konsole:

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man logrotate

[doktor5000]

I believe you cannot use logrotate with journal logs, as those are not plaintext logs. Apart from that journald already has its own rotation mechanism, it just has to be configured if you have particular needs.

[gohlip]

I don't do this much myself, but there's a way to clear journal logs
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... ctl#194058

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journalctl --vacuum-size=500M
journalctl --vacuum-time=2d

But since this is in text files, the space cleared may not be as much as "urpme --auto-orphans" or just removing older kernels (but always best to have at least 2 kernels).

[doktor5000]

Yes, but the --vacuum options have only been added in systemd 218, and are not available in mga5. What you could do is mentioned by an Arch user a few posts further in that thread: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/184348/83329

Apart from that, journald logs can consume a pretty large space as mentioned by jiml8
FWIW easiest way to see the limits for your system is to check the output of

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systemctl status systemd-journald.service -al

Also as mentioned, the journal log files are binary files, not plaintext. See https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwa ... nal-files/ for details.

[gohlip]

okay,

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[pop@Two ~]$ systemctl --version
systemd 230
[pop@Two ~]$
[pop@Two ~]$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=2d
[sudo] password for pop:
.
.
.Vacuuming done, freed 1.2G of archived journals on disk.

[pop@Two ~]$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M
Vacuuming done, freed 0B of archived journals on disk.
[pop@Two ~]$


But yes, I'm on M6. I haven't done this ...perhaps since M3 ?

[ozky]

Would this help what i have used to limit journal log file max size to 50mb. ?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy ... size_limit

[doktor5000]

I've mentioned that already before, but the OP didn't reply anymore ...

[ozky]

Yeah i noticed it from that one link thx.