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Accepted
Darth Egregious
Asked: 2012-05-04 05:20:37 +0800 CST

My home partition slowly fills up until the system is unable to complete even simple tasks

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So I have an awesome configuration on my home pc. My /home directory has its own partition.

My home partition slowly fills up until the system is unable to complete even simple tasks. For example, when this issue has occured, I can load up firefox. It just pops up an error message saying that it cannot be done.

Rebooting solves the issue.

The strange thing is, I've run baobab and it doesn't notice a problem. There should be hundreds of gigabytes of data somewhere, but it doesn't see it.

Does anyone have any idea of how I might troubleshoot this issue? I'm thinking I could do lsof but I've always found the output of that to be too much information.

Maybe my drive is, like, dying.

Edit: is there a /home analog of /var that gets cleared out at boot time? Maybe I could check in there next time I notice this problem to see if I can divine what's up.

Update: I found the issue. my .xsession-errors file is filling up with

Authentication deferred - ignoring client message

Is there a way I can see what is causing this error and fix it?

home-directory

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I cleared the errors to the file as well but it just kept filling up.

    To avoid a reboot, I killed the vino-server process:

    $ ps -eaf |grep vino
  username  5849  5765  3 Jun21 ?        09:19:12 /usr/lib/vino/vino-server --sm-disable
  username 18207  5891  0 21:07 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto vino

$ sudo kill 5849

    I cleared the errors again:

    $ > /home/useraname/.xesession-errors

    Then I restarted the process:

    $ /usr/lib/vino/vino-server --sm-disable

    FYI - this is ubuntu 12

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  2. I can confirm that it is caused by vino-server. I killed vino-server, and the non-stop errors to ~/.xsession-errors stopped.

    I am not sure that the vino-server is being "attacked", because in my case, the Ubuntu box is inside my VPN, and not accessible from the Internet.

    However, I do use VNC from my MacBookAir (MBA) to remote into the Ubuntu box, and thus, there may be some kind of bad interaction between the MBA VNC client and the Ubuntu VNC server (vino-server).

    Perhaps someone else can explore this.

    • 2

  3. I just wrote a post in the forums of what I found to be the root cause of this issue. In my logs it appeared as if what caused the log file to grow so large was a brute-force attack. The log filling up is a result of the failed attempts to authenticate to your system's VNC server. After a certain number of failed attempts it appears as if the VNC server just starts rejecting the attempted connections without giving them a chance to authenticate (which is good). Luckily, if these are still happening then most likely they haven't hacked you yet. Check out my post if you are interested.

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=12507381&postcount=9

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  4. I have no idea how to see what's causing the problem, but I deleted the .xsession-errors file, then touched it by root. Think this should effectively solve the problem. I'm going to leave this unaccepted though in case anyone ever supplies a real solution.

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