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I just did a fresh install on a 1 TB SDD. Install is fine. I checked the disk using Disks and I see the percentage full continuously increasing. Why is this happening?

I noticed that I don't see a swap partition - could that be the reason?

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Now the full space is up to 11.9% and keeps increasing.

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lonslo
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  • First of all, use your investigative skills to find out who is eating your disk space. A good starting point would be sudo du -ms /* 2> /dev/null | sort -nr, which will give you a list of top level directories sorted in descending order of used disk space. Then pick one and drill down. – AlexP Jun 03 '18 at 08:00
  • Thanks, AlexP for your comment. I used 'sudo du -ms /* 2> /dev/null | sort -nr' and found out that files are growing in /home and no other location. I left my system off today to save disk space. When I turned it on, the percent full started increasing again and then I saw a system error: Details: polkit.subject-pid: 2179 / polkit.caller-pid: 3574 Action: com.Ubuntu.apport.apport-gtk-root - the error report that generated the internal error has a section - JournalErrors - PCIe Bus Error:severity=Corrected,type=Physical Layer - there are 10 or more of these. The disk I installed to is 1 TB SSD. – lonslo Jun 04 '18 at 03:46
  • Found the source: /var/log/ - this log directory is 317 GB and keeps growing. HD is 34% full and keeps growing. – lonslo Jun 04 '18 at 04:05
  • kern.log is 163 GB and syslog.1 is 164 GB – lonslo Jun 04 '18 at 04:12
  • I believe I have implemented a solution. I will monitor overnight and post solution details tomorrow if all is well. So far disk utilization is 'normal'. – lonslo Jun 04 '18 at 04:40

1 Answers1

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While searching for information regarding kern.log and syslog.1, I found a page to zero the file size. I performed this after I resolved the source of the problem.

The source was that in the background, I had a constant error regarding PCIe Bus Error. This was throwing line after line scrolling on the screen and I didn't see it until I shut the machine down.

Searching for the PCIe Bus Error led me to this page: it describes how to apply the fix. This worked for me.

you need to add pci=noaer to your kernel command line.

Following the instruction on the page mentioned, the errors stopped and no further space was taken up by logs.

I then zeroed the kern.log and syslog.1 which had become very large - over 160 GB using the 'Shortest method:' from this page.

What resolved the issue?

  1. Add pci=noaer to kernel command line
  2. zero log files kernel.log and syslog.1
lonslo
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  • +1 to both your question and answer. Can you change the title to include pci=noaer and/or Kern.log to make it more searchable by others? – WinEunuuchs2Unix Jun 04 '18 at 15:10