My wife, Jamie, is an avid equestrian who competes in the sport of dressage.  It is all about the connection of horse and rider and she trains horses up through the levels.  Her last horse competed at Prix St. Georges and her baby, Aden (6 yrs), is getting ready to start competing this year.

Jamie on her horse, Aden.  Picture taken with LG flip phone at JMG Stables in Clinton, Montana.

We have a linux server running that hosts our internal systems like CRM.  We noticed significant slowdown of the system and failure to run batches on email.  In logging into the control panel for the server I was shocked to see 58GB of 73GB used for the disk.  Given only 9 domains and neither reported exceeding their allocated space, we didn’t know what used up all the space on the server.

I found two great resources that helped me isolate the issue.  First was identifying a series of commands that would display the largest files/directories on the server to start investigating:

# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

Thanks to: nixCraft

I ran this command and found that /var and /var/logs and /var/logs/audit.d/  directories had 50GB of file system used up.  I found in /var/logs/audit.d/ that there were save.1, save.2 … files all over 2MB each and hundreds of them.  In searching online I learned that these audit logs were not crucial and followed instructions to remove them and turn the audit service off (given internal systems anyway).

See this post from: Frank Mash - thanks Frank!

After performing these two steps, the CRM system is running fine and faster than ever.  Our control panel reports only 5GB used of 73GB on disk and I can breathe easy for a little while.    Hope this helps somebody else out there.

Since last year my friend has been raving over Redbox, $1 DVD rentals, in our local Albertsons grocery stores. Given I usually buy all my DVDs (avid collector), I didn’t try the service. Tonight I tried for the first time. You can either choose from the onscreen menu on the machine or order online in advance. I chose the latter. It was very cool because I ordered two movies, showed up at Albertsons, swiped my credit card and out popped my 2 DVDs within less than a minute.

I’d recommend Redbox.  No subscriptions, no waiting for the mail, $1 rentals, no lines and no hassles.