Disk partitions

Question

Hi,
I have been assigned the task of fixing a Solaris system on Intel platform.
There are two problems that I fugured out. The root filesystem is 100% full.
And number two I am unable to connect via telnet to the server from any other PC.
Could anyone tell me, how do I extend the root file system and what all things I need to do so that telnet can be used to connect to the server from other PCs.
Thanks a lot
Amitava

Answer 1

Perhaps you should first try to find out why the root
filesystem is 100% full. Sometimes someone mistypes a
tape device name while performing a backup and the whole
backup is written as a huge file into the root filesystem;
or some server/daemon has produced huge amounts of log file
entries (or other things like that).
Run something like "find / -xdev -type f -size +5000 -ls"
and check the resulting list. The command searches for
plain files > 5000 blocks (> 2.5Mbytes). Maybe you can
identify some files that need cleaning / can be deleted.
Sometimes you cannot identify files using up disk space
using a find command like the one given above,
because the file is already deleted from the filesystem,
but some process still keeps a reference to that deleted
file. The kernel cannot free the file's data until
that process closes the last reference to the file.
You can identify processes that keep references to
big, deleted files using a different find command:
"find /proc/*/fd -type f -size +5000 -links 0 -ls".
This searches the machine's process "filesystem"
for processes with file descriptors that have no links
in the filesystem (-links 0), and that are plain files
(-type f) bigger than >2.5Mbytes (-size +5000).
If this second find command produces any output:
The number between /proc/ and /fd/ is the pid of a process,
the number after /fd/ is the file descriptor number
inside that process. You can free the file system space
by stopping / restarting that process/daemon.
For the telnet problem: How long did you wait for a
server prompt? Wait at least a minute or two. If the
server prompt appears after a long delay, the typical
problem is that the server tries to look up the hostname
for the client connecting to it, and the name service
(DNS?) is slow or does not respond. The hostname lookup
eventually times out (after 60 seconds for example) and the
telnet prompt appears. This can be fixed by making sure
that the server gets name service responses for each
pc connecting to it.