At 11:40 1/24/2004, you wrote:
My 583MB /var partition is 88% full, with a large chunk of that 88% being in the /var/spool/up2date directory. Is there a procedure for cleaning out the up2date directory?
The /var/spool/up2date directory should contain .rpm files and .hdr files. I am 99% confident that nothing you delete will hurt the up2date process (and I am 100% sure that you won't damage the RPM database). I suggest you simply delete the .rpm files (which take up all the space) and leave the .hdr files since these are what up2date uses to determine what updates are available, what they depend on, and whether you need them.
<snip>
Sound advice, but with a caveat I would add. If you can keep a copy of the files in /var/spool/up2date backed up somewhere (like a CD) it would be somewhat handy if you ever have to reload Fedora, or if you want it installed fresh on another computer. Recall that when you install from CDs, all of that 500 MB or so of updates needs to come from somewhere to bring the system back up to date. If you have a very high-speed connection, perhaps it doesn't matter much, but if you have a 56k modem, consider saving the rpm files. You can reduce the size of the backup a little be retaining only the latest versions of each package.
If you have another disk partition with a lot more room than /var has, then you can configure up2date to place the files wherever you want. For instance, I stuck in an old 20 GB drive and mount it as /extra, and point up2date to /extra/spool/up2date. I also keep bits and pieces of personal data there, and if I should need to re-install I don't format that partition :-) And when I up-graded from RH9 to FC1, I first moved the big pile of RH9 updates to another directory on /extra, in case I needed to re-install RH9.
-- Fritz Whittington I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope (Aeschylus, Agamemnon)
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