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  • RHEL 7.2 system, df and du /var/log inconsistent results. 84MB actual usage, df shows 80% full

    Posted on

    I have a RHEL 7.2 system with a (miserably small) 4 GB /var/log xfs file system mounted (we're increasing it tomorrow). However, I'm noticing a very strange (to me) inconsistency between the results of

    df -PhT /var/log
    showing 80% consumption and
    du -sk /var/log/*
    and
    du -skh /var/log
    which only shows 84MB (megabytes, not GB). consumption. As I typed this, I found sssd had to be restarted to release some uneeded log files.

    A

    df -PhT /var/log
    shows it 80% full, however, a
    du -skh /var/log
    shows realistic 84M actual usage.

    Here's some relevant info...

    [root@rhel72server] # du -sk /var/log/* | sort -nr 
    21632 /var/log/messages
    14920 /var/log/mesos
    11004 /var/log/aide
    2912 /var/log/httmpd
    2648 /var/log/exhibitor.log
    *truncated*
    
    [root@rhel72server] # du -skh /var/log
    84M   /var/log
    
    [root@rhel72server] # df -PhT /var/log
    /dev/mapper/disk0-varlog xfs 4G  4.2G   825M  80%   /var/log
    

    I've zeroed out the lastlog sparse fiile by redirecting /dev/null to it and that makes no difference to the above.

    My initial search led me to do an

    lsof | grep deleted
    . which yielded some apparent files that were deleted but apparently are being counted against the
    df -PhT /var/log
    , and when I restarted the sssd service, the deleted-but-not-released files were finally released.

    [root@rhel72server] # cd /var/log
    [root@rhel72server] # lsof | grep deleted
    sssd_be 1828  root 10w REG 253,7 3258809724 4194460 /var/log/sssd/sssd_redacted_fqdn.log-20160501 (deleted)
    sssd        1823 root 3w REG 253,7      62771719   4194459 /var/log/sssd/sssd.log-20160501 (deleted)
    sssd_be 1828 root 17w REG 253,7     1482662    4194453 /var/log/sssd/ldap_child.log-20160502 (deleted)
    wpa_suppl 1837 root 3w REG 253,7          120             145   /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log-20160504 (deleted)
    *truncated for only /var/log*
    

    So seeing that "sssd" is the

    life of the party
    , I did a

    [root@rhel72server] # systemctl restart sssd
    [root@rhel72server] # df -PhT /var/log
    /dev/mapper/disk0-varlog xfs 4G  4.2G   4.0G 3%   /var/log
    

    And this released the files in question so

    df
    and
    du
    against that directory are more consistent. I've seen this once against a RHEL 5 system, a long while ago but have not seen it (personally) against rhel 6 (it probably exists under rhel 6, but I just have not experienced it with rhel6 in my environment).

    Does anyone have any ideas on how to deal with sssd logs that are rotated off ? (I have already added "compress" to the logrotate directives, and I plan on examining sssd logs for errant issues)

    I turned

    debug_level = 5
    to
    debug_level = 1
    in /etc/sssd/sssd.conf under the
    [sssd]
    and
    [domain/redacted.fqdn.something]
    headers. Is there a recommended debug_level for /etc/sssd/sssd.conf?

    I'd appreciate any assistance/recommendations.

    Thanks
    RJ

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