On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 05:10:15AM -0700, William Morder wrote:
Okay, so riddle me this: Why does space on my root partition keep disappearing?
When you say root partition, I assume you mean that /home is a separate partition.
Check for anything unusual in the logs. What do they say?
One you might not think of is .xsession-errors, which is normally in your home directory. If you are logged into a GUI as root, you could have /root/.xsession-errors too. I once had one grow large enough to fill my home partition in a matter of hours. I don't remember what was causing it, sorry, but if you find the .xsession-errors file is huge, you can always read it and see what it says.
(I'm assuming the systemd hasn't eliminated .xsession-errors, like they've eliminated everything else pure and good in the world...)
Check for file system corruption.
https://superuser.com/questions/401217/how-to-check-root-partition-with-fsck
Run smartctrl to check the disk. Suppose your root partition is on /dev/sda, I would run something like:
# basic health check smartctl -H -d ata /dev/sda
# short test smartctl -t short -C -d ata /dev/sda smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl isn't the easiest or most intuitive program in the world, make sure you read some tutorials first. Try this one:
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SMART_tests_with_smartctl
If you're running solid state disks, there's probably no point: in general, they either work, or die, with nothing in between.
If you've eliminated everything else -- emptied all caches, no file system corruption or bad disks, no unusual entries in the logs etc -- then you may have to consider the possibility that you've been hacked, despite all your security. If somebody is using your computer for bitcoin mining, that might do it: the block chain exceeded 100GB a few years ago.
http://www.coinfox.info/news/6700-bitcoin-blockchain-size-reaches-100-gb
Yes, that's 100 gigabytes. Or simply storing their warez on your computer, like it's 1999 again :-)