Holy Fsck
 

I've been watching the free space on my / evaporate for a month now, mostly periodically pushing mysql to its limits and having to restart it.

Aftert he second time hitting 100% used on / because of log files I started trimming back some stuff but the numbers wouldnt add up. I should have had about 8 gig according to the files I found in / (including var), but df said it was closer to 20.

That left one thing, fsck. If you've never messed with a linux machine, fsck is like chkdisk for windows. It has one bad trait though (or you might call it good), if it finds something really nasty it drops to single user mode and tells you to run it manually. And it doesnt start sshd. It just sits there waiting. Thats ok if you are sitting next to the machine, but not so much when your 700 miles from it.

But I needed the disk space. So after talking with the excellent support guys at cyberwurx, I had it fsck on a reboot. It took about 3 minutes (butt-puckered minutes) then sshd answered. And I went from 87% used to 17%.

Now I'm gonna have some scotch!

Cleo, do you run your sites on OSX? That would seem like a natural thing for a mac user to do.

In linux land, we have ext3 instead of hfs.

I have managed hosting at colo-cation and it is linux but if I didn't have managed hosting then I would probably go with OSX as it would be easier for me to manage.

HFS is decent, especially now that it is journaled, but Apple at some point is going to move onto something else. 10.6 was suppose to start moving to ZFS but Apple has quietly removed all references to ZFS.

ext4 is better. Supposedly it is now quite stable on the 2.6.3x kernels but I have yet to risk it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4