/var/crash/ directory full?

D

desnudopenguino

I've been messing around w/ FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE on my new build and ran into a problem two days ago... When booting the machine, it would hang at "Writing crash summary to /var/crash/core.txt.4". So I tried to reboot a couple more times to no avail (just thought it was being funky). Then I thought to myself "maybe /var/crash/ is full", I mean... it has 4 core dumps in it, but I thought it would have yelled at me during boot instead of just hanging there. So I threw in a live cd, and booted with that, no problem. Then I poked around and figured out which slice had /var on it & cleaned out the crash directory.

I have a question about this... Should the crash directory be cleaned out manually? I mean obviously it worked (so far) but is this a good practice? or is there some other way to manage the core dumps?
 
SirDice said:
The best way is not to get them in the first place ;)
Click to expand...
Haha, true but I like to blow things up on occasion :p

Alt said:
You can turn them off at all by adding this
kern.coredump=0
Click to expand...
in /etc/sysctl.conf file
Click to expand...
Thanks for the tip, I'll have to remember it.

I like having the core dumps enabled so that I can try to figure out what's causing stuff to break. I was just wondering if there's any reason that I should not clear out the /var/crash/ directory.
 
desnudopenguino said:
I was just wondering if there's any reason that I should not clear out the /var/crash/ directory.
Click to expand...
Once you have extracted the information from the dumps, you are safe to delete the vmcore.* files.
I can't remember if its now the default (you can check by yourself looking at the size of vmcore files), but to save some space, you can add debug.minidump=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf so the vmcore will not be the size of the physical memory.

EDIT:
according to the 7.0 release notes, minidump should now be the default
 
/var/crash

Please forgive me I have taken over for a previous admin and am still getting to know FreeBSD.
These are the files in my /var/crash directory, my /var is 75% full and I feel I should delete some of these files.

From reading other posts I believe I can delete the vmcore files at the very least.

Thank you very much

Code: 
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel          3 Oct 25  2011 bounds
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        468 Jan 26  2009 info.0
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        457 Jan 26  2009 info.1
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        513 Aug 10  2011 info.10
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        513 Aug 14  2011 info.11
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        513 Aug 25  2011 info.12
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        513 Sep 11  2011 info.13
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        512 Sep 25  2011 info.14
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        513 Sep 27  2011 info.15
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        513 Oct 25  2011 info.16
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        457 Jan 26  2009 info.2
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        468 Jan 26  2009 info.3
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        467 Jan 26  2009 info.4
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        493 Jan 26  2009 info.5
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        467 Jan 26  2009 info.6
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        467 Jan 27  2009 info.7
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        467 Jan 27  2009 info.8
-rw-------  1 root  wheel        512 Aug  6  2011 info.9
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel          5 Jan  1  2009 minfree
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  129515520 Aug 10  2011 vmcore.10
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  125325312 Aug 14  2011 vmcore.11
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  137674752 Aug 25  2011 vmcore.12
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  136654848 Sep 11  2011 vmcore.13
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  132464640 Sep 25  2011 vmcore.14
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  123527168 Sep 27  2011 vmcore.15
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  133545984 Oct 25  2011 vmcore.16
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  139333632 Aug  6  2011 vmcore.9
 
Unless you need them for debugging...
Code: 
cd /var
/bin/rm -rf crash
mkdir crash
I often delete all files in a directory that way.
 
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