Out of disk space..how to free

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
>  We are using Webmin for our email server and we have been receiving the 
> following message:At boot up:     File system full After boot up:    low 
> on space (have 0,SMTP - DAEMON needs 01 i /var/spool/mqueue I'm unfamiliar 
> with FreeBSD, but I've worked with Linux in the past.  How do I free up 
> some space?  I've already deleted about 5000 email messages and rebooted 
> the server (FreeBSD 4.0) about 4 times with the same messages.  Got any 
> ideas and directions?Thanks,Tom

First, please set your Email utility to break lines at about 72 characters.
It would make things easier for all of uw.

And to your question.
It is impossible to tell how your system's disk is set up from
the little information that you give.

Check your system disk space with df   type 
                 df -k   
at a prompt and you will see a display of your file systems and how 
full they are.  Ignore procfs.  It is a dummy filesystem and is 
always at 100%.  It may be that you created /var as a separate file
system or it may be within another file system.

Then, cd in to the full file system and use du to see which 
directory tree is using up so much space.   type:
                 du -sk *
It may be a pile of outgoing messages that haven't been delivered or 
bounces trying to be delivered that are too big for users' quotas, etc
or it may be something else.  Maybe your log files are accumulating in 
the same filesystem and need cleaning up, for example.  

Now you have to decide what to do.   If there are obvious things you can 
get rid of, you are lucky.   It may be less obvious.  You may need go down 
additional levels in the directory tree and do additional   du commands
to narrow things down.  You may also need to look inside some of the 
messages in /var/spool/mqueue and see what is going on.  Note that in
.../mqueue there should be a matching control file for each message
file.  The first characters in the file name differ, but the last are
what links the control file to the message file.

You may discover that you really need more room in the file system or
need to reorganize your file systems so some errant process or logs or
Email bounces don't interfere with the rest of the system operation.

Good luck and after you sort out more information, you may need to
ask more questions.

////jerry