grospied Posted April 23, 2011 Author Posted April 23, 2011 Deleting directory... Directory removed. Wait 24 hours; the cpanel disk usage runs on a cron. The directory and the problem are unchanged. Did something go wrong?
Guest Geoff Posted April 23, 2011 Posted April 23, 2011 This support request is being escalated to our root admin.
Ashoat Posted April 25, 2011 Posted April 25, 2011 GEOFF: DO NOT TOUCH THE VIRTFS DIRECTORY. SERIOUSLY. Last time I deleted stuff from that directory all of HelioHost was down for about a month. That directory is bind mounted to actual resources on disk. When you delete from that directory, you delete the actual resource on disk. Luckily you only deleted /var/spool/mail/grospied this time, but if you had rm -f'd /home/virtfs/dblatt the server would be completely down right now. You need to stop running commands and doing things you do not fully understand. Before deleting a directory, you need to 100% know what it is for. Before running a command, you need to know 100% what it is for. This sort of behavior can lead to very bad results. grospied: Are you encountering problems as a result of miscalculated disk usage?
Guest Geoff Posted April 25, 2011 Posted April 25, 2011 Luckily you only deleted /var/spool/mail/grospied this time, but if you had rm -f'd /home/virtfs/dblatt the server would be completely down right now. I don't understand. I looked what /var/spool/mail/user was for, and it seemed safe to delete. I didn't know /var/spool/mail/user was so important; it only stores mail. I thought that he might have had extra mail that was taking up his space or something. I was only deleting the files that he owned, nothing else. but if you had rm -f'd /home/virtfs/dblatt the server would be completely down right now. That would be like running: rm -R -f / Users don't own any important files (or at least they shouldn't). Since he owned that file, this clarified that it was not important. Before deleting a directory, you need to 100% know what it is for. For storing mail Before running a command, you need to know 100% what it is for For removing the file that stores mail. grospied: Are you encountering problems as a result of miscalculated disk usage? Cpanel thinks there are files outside his home directory that he owns; that's why I ran the find operation. However, that was the only file outside his home directory, and I deleted it.
Ashoat Posted April 26, 2011 Posted April 26, 2011 I'm not convinced you understood what /home/virtfs was. You deleted something within that directory. Whether or not you felt like you knew what the file within that directory was, you don't seem to have known what /home/virtfs was for. Deleting a file from a directory you don't understand is not a good idea.
Ashoat Posted April 26, 2011 Posted April 26, 2011 I think he only had one file in virtfs? In the past, this issue has been caused by stale quota counts on cPanel's part, and was fixed by running the annoying long upcp script. As for the directory: what you think you know about Linux might not be correct. You would think that removing a link to a file will not affect anything, but you probably won't be considering the rarely used bind mount feature. Similarly, just because a file is owned by a user doesn't mean deleting it doesn't mess things up. The ideal thing to do in scenarios like this is to escalate the request to me, see what I do, ask me how I did it, and then keep doing that in the future. I know this sounds overly bureaucratic and you'd like more flexibility, which is why I tend to let you run commands without checking over all of them. But when you run a command that you don't fully understand (I don't think you knew that the /home/virtfs/* directories are bind-mounted to critical resources on disk) you run the risk of messing stuff up. Before I touch any files on disk I always Google until I know exactly what they are, what they are used for, and why there are there. To me, it looks like you just found a random file owned by a user, asked them if they knew about it, and then just deleted it. tl;dr: It's great that everything is okay this time around. Checking who owns a file is not a good enough heuristic for deciding to delete it. I'd prefer that you escalate things to me, but if you want to do things on your own then don't run commands that you don't completely, fully understand.
grospied Posted April 28, 2011 Author Posted April 28, 2011 I waited a few days, but I see no change at all. I see people are working hard on it, though. To djbob: I haven't had any problems except I would like the full 250MB available to me. Thanks djbob and Geoff
Ashoat Posted May 2, 2011 Posted May 2, 2011 Okay, I'm running /scripts/fixquotas right now. Hopefully that will solve the issue, if only at the cost of a serious amount of server load.
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