Hi All,
As SAP HANA developers we must have at least a basic understanding of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and get to know its system folders and files. So, if you fear Linux systems let me tell you that there is nothing to be afraid of, and you are still in time to start browsing around.
This week I discovered an unusual disk consumption in SLES root directory (~/) on which a HANA instance was running. It had about 49GB of free space and the day after it suddenly came down to 0%. It took me a bit of time to find out the reason for this: Linux graphical interfaces not always work correctly, generating error messages as they fail. Those messages are produced by the X-windows system and kept in the log file: ~/.xsession-errors. There was that file and a second one named ~/.xsession-errors.old. About 48GB of disk space were being used by these 2 files.
The temporary solution for this is to run the following sentences to delete both files:
rm ~/.xsession-errors rm ~/.xsession-errors.old
I said temporary because SLES will create the log file again, so we must delete the files from time to time, not very good ah?.
If any of you ever found a way to stop the X-window logging or a way to trick SUSE into thinking that the messages are being saved, please let me know!
Regards,
Alejandro Fonseca