Tonight was system cleanup day. Baobob showed me where are the gigabytes hide. The home directory got rid of huge, old VCS checkouts of various projects. Then it was time to look at the system directories. I cleaned my apt cache
sudo apt-get clean
and the cache from pbuilder. Then I found something that lead to this blog post: /var/log consumed 3.8 GB. The biggest files were
1.8 GB /var/log/kern.log
1.8 GB /var/log/syslog
4.3 MB /var/log/dpkg.log
1.4 MB /var/log/kern.log.1
Is logrotate installed?
Yes.
And is anacron installed, or is the system running overnight?
anacron is installed. The system runs sometimes overnight.
how much did you remove from all over your vcs checkout’s and apt-get “Cache”?
I freed around 10 gigabytes.
I think that pbuilder’s –autocleanaptcache option is already known to you, right?
I use following command, because I have multiple pbuilder instances:
sudo rm -f /var/cache/pbuilder/*-amd64/aptcache/* /var/cache/pbuilder/*-amd64/result/*
Sounds like logrotate is broken, it should rotate weekly and delete after a month, unless you adjust it.
Or
You have something spamming a lot of stuff into that log file, probably important if its doing it that much.