[sf-lug] SF LUG meeting of Monday May 20, 2013 & the next day.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> Thanks Rick, i will try to keep your script handy for the next time
> this happens.

Just trying to make sure we-all are able to help you with your _current_
problem:  Sounds like you eventually managed to make the symptom (of
full root filesystem) go away by shrinking and rearranging filesystems,
but you never did find why / went to 100% in the first place.

Maybe we can still help you get to the bottom of that.  

You mentioned various things you did at the meeting, but that 
you noticed later, after you got home, that the root fs was now somehow
full, having not been even close to full before.[1]  Correct?

If so, then in general terms one of two things happened:  (1) Something
shrunk your root fs during the meeting.  (2) A whole lot of space got
consumed by new or expanded files created during the meeting.

#1 seems unlikely.  If you'd shrunk your root fs, you'd have remembered
doing so and mentioned it.  So, that leaves #2.

So, did you do any operation during the meeting involving drag-copying
folders or 'cp -r' or the like?  Maybe you inadvertantly duplicated some
very large tree of files.  If you did, and you have some recollection of
where you were and what you were near at the time, you should be able to
find the ringer subtree that isn't supposed to exist.  E.g., if you
remember you'd been drag-copying folders as user 'bliss' in a graphical
file manager, you might find something anomalous in one of the places
'bliss' is permitted to create files, like, say, a huge folder called
'usr' inside /home/bliss, /tmp, or some place like that.

If it's possible you had a similar mishap committed with root-user
authority, that's potentially a bit more difficult to diagnose after the
fact, as the files could have been bulk-copied to any destination.

I mentioned /usr because it's the largest subtree around (on a typical
system); hence, accidentally drag-copying it would be a great way to 
totally fill a filesystem.  However, there are others.


[1] This assumes you were at least vaguely cognizant of filesystem free
space and usage before the meeting and hadn't, say, been going around
99% full all along.  E.g., you bothered to run 'df' occasionally and
would have noticed space problems.  Some folks do, other folks never do.