pcl crashed today - now no space on device

[joseppi]

My pcl system crashed today - screen just went black when I clicked on the calendar.  Could no longer boot to kde.  So, I booted into safe mode and 'df' shows the root partition (12 gig) is filled.

My home directory seems to be intact (thank God), but I can't figure out what has happened to fill up the root partition.

'du' on '/' shows a total of only 3.5 gig of space used, so why is the rest of the root partition filled up with 12-gig of space used?

I tried to ssh login to the system from another computer wire-connected on the same ethernet but 'ssh' says "no route to host."  I did '/etc/init.d/sshd start' and got the response "OK" but I cannot connect.  'ifconfig' is found on the system, but returns no response when I invoke it.

[Neal ManBear]

Run bleachbit and bleachbit-root to clean up your system. That will free up some space. Check /var/cache/apt/archives for any RPM packages. If present, delete them (as root).     

[joseppi]

Run bleachbit and bleachbit-root to clean up your system. That will free up some space. Check /var/cache/apt/archives for any RPM packages. If present, delete them (as root).     

bleachbit worked, but bleachbit-root did not work (bash: bleachbit-root: command not found)

/var/cache/apt/archives was empty.

But I found that /var/log/ had huge 'message' and 'syslog' files that apparently caused my system to crash.  Also the 'message' and 'syslog' files seem to be identical in size (redundant?) -- why?

I was able to delete some of the older files and free up enough space that I was able to restart the system.

But now I need to find out why the system is creating this enormous number of error messages!

395,450 entries in /var/log/messages for two days (Sept 2nd through 3rd). I shut the system down last night about 8 pm to stop it from posting more error messages, then restarted it this morning, Sept 4. In the first 1.5 hours, it added 682 new entries to messages that I posted at this link:

http://www.upquick.com/temp/messagesSep4.txt

deleting some of the message files reduced the root partition from 12G to 9.8G but that is still almost 3-times the size it should be.  Here are the current 'df' results:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              12G  9.8G  1.5G  88% /
tmpfs                 473M     0  473M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6             168G   23G  145G  14% /home

So, how can I find out what all these error messages mean and what changes I need to make to stop this huge ongoing posting of error messages?

Also, since /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog seem to be redundant, can I safely delete one or the other (and which)?

[Neal ManBear]

You can delete all files in /var/log but rpmpkgs. But do not delete the folders.