[Techtalk] machine hanging

[Maria McKinley]

B Seeger wrote:
> Howdy, 
> 
> I have a machine in the lab that loves to hang when I either try scp
> something off of it or plug in a USB stick, or do something intense like
> tell it to rotate the logs. 
> 
>>From what I can figure out, the OS (linux 2.4.31 - debian) is taking up
> 95% of it's partition's space and the logs grow unchecked (though not
> fast enough to really cause _the_ problem).  I suspect that the
> partition being almost full is the essence of my problem... 
> 
> Other then getting the logs to roll and get back some space, does anyone
> have any ideas of what else I could check? 
> 
> Some stats:
> 
> df -h:
> 
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1             989M  891M   48M  95% /
> tmpfs                 442M     0  442M   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/sda3              67G   11G   53G  18% /data0
> 
> 
> Honestly, I don't know what tempfs is... (I just inherited this project
> after it was sitting still for a year or so...)
> 
> 
> cat /proc/meminfo:
>         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> Mem:  926068736 134758400 791310336        0  5095424  7708672
> Swap: 320774144        0 320774144
> MemTotal:       904364 kB
> MemFree:        772764 kB
> MemShared:           0 kB
> Buffers:          4976 kB
> Cached:           7528 kB
> SwapCached:          0 kB
> Active:           9536 kB
> Inactive:         3028 kB
> HighTotal:           0 kB
> HighFree:            0 kB
> LowTotal:       904364 kB
> LowFree:        772764 kB
> SwapTotal:      313256 kB
> SwapFree:       313256 kB
>  
> 
> My guess is that anything intense is overburdening this machine and
> locking it up (I have to do a hard reboot).  I'm not sure how to solve
> this problem, short of a re-install or freeing up some space.  Can I
> repartition it w/ out a re-installing?  Don't think so, but worth
> asking...
> 
> I didn't originally configure this machine and I thought it was running
> fine until I asked it to do something more substantial then "ls" or
> "du". 
> 
> Sigh... any advice? 
> 
> -Bethany
> 
> 

One easy (and nowadays not very expensive) solution in situations like 
this is to add another hard drive, and move a couple of large 
directories over to it, assuming that there is room in the computer 
box/motherboard for another drive.

~maria