I solved a mystery today: the mystery of the disappearing drive space on my web server computer. 😎
A little background: I’ve had the web server for a while and it’s been doing it’s job magnificently. It’s none too powerful, and it only has a 6 GB hard drive. When I originally put everything in place, there was only about 1 GB free, but that was okay, because how much stuff would a personal web site take up?
Well, over the last couple of years I’ve been taking steps to find more space, including moving the website itself to an external drive because the hard drive was filling up. It was a bit of a head-scratcher, because there’s nothing on the computer other than the web server. What was taking the space. I would remove stuff, and then a month later the drive’s full again. It’s like the tide eternally coming in…
It was the last straw the last month or so. The web server had gone down repeatedly when it got busy because the virtual memory would clog the hard drive and choke itself. I even started looking into replacement hardware. It did it again this morning, and I decided to go hunting in the UNIX directories.
Guess what I found? Heck, I didn’t even know what I’d found when I found it. I went into a directory and I couldn’t list it’s contents. There was that much stuff in there. 514,800 files adding up to almost 2 GB of space.
Guess why it was there? A couple of years ago I played with setting up the web server as an email server. I never got it working, and I guess I never turned it off either. I don’t know what it was doing all that time, but it certainly liked writing files into its maildrop folder. It was like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I had left it on, and that was what happened. Now I’ve found it, turned it off, and deleted the files.
Lots of space now! 😉
