• Want recommendations for SSD drive for Pi

    From Chris Green@3:770/3 to All on Thu Jan 13 17:54:52 2022
    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from
    the micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake devices
    so can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare space so
    even a 32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost as cheap.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 18:27:46 2022
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:54:52 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from the
    micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake devices so
    can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare space so even a
    32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost as cheap.

    I've been using a 128GB Sandisk SSD for the last 5 years without any
    problems, though it is SATA connected rather than USB, but I see they
    also sell USB connected 128 GB SSD devices. They're also my preferred SD
    card supplier.

    If you install an SSD drive, do install and use "fstrim -a -v" as a
    weekly cron job to keep the SSD's block structure tidy.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Thu Jan 13 18:49:29 2022
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:54:52 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from the micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake devices so can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare space so even a 32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost as cheap.

    I've been using a 128GB Sandisk SSD for the last 5 years without any problems, though it is SATA connected rather than USB, but I see they
    also sell USB connected 128 GB SSD devices. They're also my preferred SD
    card supplier.

    Thanks, useful.


    If you install an SSD drive, do install and use "fstrim -a -v" as a
    weekly cron job to keep the SSD's block structure tidy.

    Doesn't it tend to second guess the SSD's own wear levelling? Looking
    at the man page I'm not at all clear what it does:-

    fstrim is used on a mounted filesystem to discard (or "trim")
    blocks which are not in use by the filesystem...

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it
    discards blocks allocated because the minimum allocation by the OS is
    larger than the actual device block size?


    ... and further, it's run automatically by systemd on my systems.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 19:16:36 2022
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:49:29 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it
    discards blocks allocated because the minimum allocation by the OS is
    larger than the actual device block size?

    Pass. My guess is that it compacts and possibly reorders the free block
    chain. However, I don't understand why they'd calling that 'discarding'
    blocks since no blocks are actually discarded, i.e. marked unusable.

    ... and further, it's run automatically by systemd on my systems.

    Fairy Snuff. It wasn't on my system, an old Lenovo R61i running Fedora
    Linux, where it replaced a 120GB HDD when that died.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 19:14:01 2022
    On 13/01/2022 17:54, Chris Green wrote:
    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from
    the micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake devices
    so can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare space so
    even a 32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost as cheap.

    After a duff initial one Ive specialised in Kingston SSDS BOUGHT FROM
    KINGSTON. Any Chinese knock off can have a Kingston sticker on it

    Smallest they do these days is 120GB for £22.75 UK sterling price

    https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/ssd/a400-solid-state-drive#atc


    Of course that will need a USB to SATA adapter of some sort



    --
    There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do
    that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon
    emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent renewable energy.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Thu Jan 13 19:41:17 2022
    On 13/01/2022 19:16, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:49:29 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it
    discards blocks allocated because the minimum allocation by the OS is
    larger than the actual device block size?

    Pass. My guess is that it compacts and possibly reorders the free block chain. However, I don't understand why they'd calling that 'discarding' blocks since no blocks are actually discarded, i.e. marked unusable.

    ... and further, it's run automatically by systemd on my systems.

    Fairy Snuff. It wasn't on my system, an old Lenovo R61i running Fedora
    Linux, where it replaced a 120GB HDD when that died.


    The more I look into SSDS the more convinced I am that they have all the
    smarts inside them to make them last and faffing around at the linux
    level will only reduce performance/life

    I have retired my old desktop with a 6 years old SSD in it used daily
    and for logfiles too, and it was still estimated 97% of life left when I
    last switched it on. In a few more months after I am sure I wont need
    it, I'll reinstall it and turn it into a server or something,



    --
    "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,
    that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

    Jonathan Swift.
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 19:53:59 2022
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:49:29 +0000
    Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:

    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    If you install an SSD drive, do install and use "fstrim -a -v" as a
    weekly cron job to keep the SSD's block structure tidy.

    Doesn't it tend to second guess the SSD's own wear levelling? Looking
    at the man page I'm not at all clear what it does:-

    As I understand it fstrim essentially passes hints to the SSD based
    on the filesystem layers knowledge of what's going on.

    fstrim is used on a mounted filesystem to discard (or "trim")
    blocks which are not in use by the filesystem...

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it

    Once a block has been used there is no way for the SSD to know that
    it has become unused unless the filesystem tells the SSD so fstrim exists
    to pass that information between the layers.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Thu Jan 13 19:59:52 2022
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
    On 13/01/2022 17:54, Chris Green wrote:
    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from
    the micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake devices
    so can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare space so
    even a 32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost as cheap.

    After a duff initial one Ive specialised in Kingston SSDS BOUGHT FROM KINGSTON. Any Chinese knock off can have a Kingston sticker on it

    Smallest they do these days is 120GB for £22.75 UK sterling price

    https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/ssd/a400-solid-state-drive#atc


    Of course that will need a USB to SATA adapter of some sort

    Thanks, that's just the sort of info I'm after.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Thu Jan 13 19:56:24 2022
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:49:29 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it
    discards blocks allocated because the minimum allocation by the OS is larger than the actual device block size?

    Pass. My guess is that it compacts and possibly reorders the free block chain. However, I don't understand why they'd calling that 'discarding' blocks since no blocks are actually discarded, i.e. marked unusable.

    the more I read about it the less I believe it does anything actually
    useful.

    ... and further, it's run automatically by systemd on my systems.

    Fairy Snuff. It wasn't on my system, an old Lenovo R61i running Fedora
    Linux, where it replaced a 120GB HDD when that died.


    --
    Chris Green
    ·
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Elvidge@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 20:13:12 2022
    On 13/01/2022 17:54, Chris Green wrote:
    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from
    the micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake devices
    so can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare space so
    even a 32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost as cheap.


    Get a small(ish) M2 drive and either an M2 to USB adapter or an M2 to
    SATA adapter. Ebay is your friend.

    --
    Chris Elvidge
    England
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Thu Jan 13 20:30:18 2022
    On 13/01/2022 19:53, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:49:29 +0000
    Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:

    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    If you install an SSD drive, do install and use "fstrim -a -v" as a
    weekly cron job to keep the SSD's block structure tidy.

    Doesn't it tend to second guess the SSD's own wear levelling? Looking
    at the man page I'm not at all clear what it does:-

    As I understand it fstrim essentially passes hints to the SSD based
    on the filesystem layers knowledge of what's going on.

    fstrim is used on a mounted filesystem to discard (or "trim")
    blocks which are not in use by the filesystem...

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it

    Once a block has been used there is no way for the SSD to know that
    it has become unused unless the filesystem tells the SSD so fstrim exists
    to pass that information between the layers.

    yes, so the idea is that deleted blocks are not just 'left' there not
    being wear levelled.

    But modern SSDS swap blocks around even when they *aren't* being rewritten
    All that matters is how often any block gets written to..

    Otherwise you would end up with a pool of static data that was written
    once years ago with bags of life left in it and a diminishing area of
    disk say occupied by log files, getting hammered.

    So the SSD must take static data and move it to higher wear blocks. All
    fstrim does it make sure it doesn't do that to *deleted* blocks.
    Although unless its a very very busy little disk, I am not sure how
    many of those there will actually be.

    (How often it does that and using what algorithm is 'implementation
    specific' to the SSD)

    Log files perhaps.

    To my mind its a bit like windows and de fragging. yes, it was handy
    years ago on old FAT based file systems, and modern windows does it to mechanical drives automatically but its seriously bad to do it to a SSD.

    And once you SSD has a 'free this block' command, its a piece of cake to
    make the operating system end that command every time it e.g. unlinks an
    inode and you can do that using the 'discard' option in fstab.

    Anyway, mostly its all enabled by default now so we don't need to worry
    our pretty little heads about it.

    six years ago I got precious about all this and did 'all the right
    things'. six years later that drive is so far ahead of any mechanical
    drive in terms of life left that I gave up worrying.

    Unless you are hammering SSDS in a data centre the best advice is 'fit
    and forget'


    --
    A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on
    its shoes.
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 20:31:26 2022
    On 13/01/2022 19:56, Chris Green wrote:
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:49:29 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    So what does 'discard' mean in this context? An 'unused block' is
    surely just that, how can you discard it? Or does it mean that it
    discards blocks allocated because the minimum allocation by the OS is
    larger than the actual device block size?

    Pass. My guess is that it compacts and possibly reorders the free block
    chain. However, I don't understand why they'd calling that 'discarding'
    blocks since no blocks are actually discarded, i.e. marked unusable.

    the more I read about it the less I believe it does anything actually
    useful.

    I think it does, but just how useful is very moot.


    ... and further, it's run automatically by systemd on my systems.

    Fairy Snuff. It wasn't on my system, an old Lenovo R61i running Fedora
    Linux, where it replaced a 120GB HDD when that died.




    --
    Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
    guns, why should we let them have ideas?

    Josef Stalin
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Vincent Coen@2:250/1 to The Natural Philosopher on Thu Jan 13 21:25:25 2022
    Hello The!

    Thursday January 13 2022 19:14, you wrote to Chris Green:

    On 13/01/2022 17:54, Chris Green wrote:
    I'm after getting a small SSD to boot my Pi 4 from, instead of from
    the micro SD.

    Buying USB sticks and drives is fraught with danger from fake
    devices so can anyone recommend a supplier? I don't need any spare
    space so even a 32Gb SSD would be fine but nowadays 128Gb is almost
    as cheap.

    After a duff initial one Ive specialised in Kingston SSDS BOUGHT FROM KINGSTON. Any Chinese knock off can have a Kingston sticker on it

    Smallest they do these days is 120GB for £22.75 UK sterling price

    https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/ssd/a400-solid-state-drive#a
    tc


    Of course that will need a USB to SATA adapter of some sort

    Having some experience of SSD's with Linux and my first try with Crucial only to find that their controller needs the system to be idle before it will do a full check for empty and unused clusters which it some what difficult to occur under a multi-user task system.

    I switched to Samsung 850, 950+ series SSD's both for SATA and M2 connections along with using sudo fstrim -av.

    Works a treat but on a busy system run it via cron say at midnight and noon
    and you will not have any problems and that is on a very busy system running FTP, web servers as well as a BBS.

    Not had a problem since although if you really add a high volume of files you might want to run it more often.

    Note that you must also run fstrim after a reboot for safety if doing the above.

    For normal usage once per day 'should' be ok.

    This is on a normal computer systems and a media system (running Linux and mythtv that can record up to 48 channels at once but usually two at most.

    SSD's are available with a USB 2 or 3 interface so minimum connectors required.
    I am saying that as I have a 3B+ using a geekworm x850 HDD drive board and metal casing.

    If I can ever find one I will consider getting a 4B 8Gb and use a USB SSD from - yes you guessed it Samsung.

    As I said above you MUST use FSTRIM with is in the lib Linux-utils for my platform which is standard but who knows with Raspian or Bullseye (Debian) and yes I have upgraded to it over the last 7 days using the buster2bullseye.sh script via the forum.

    Vincent

    --- Mageia Linux v8 X64/Mbse v1.0.7.24/GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20180707
    * Origin: Air Applewood, The Linux Gateway to the UK & Eire (2:250/1)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Thu Jan 13 21:41:53 2022
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:30:18 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

    So the SSD must take static data and move it to higher wear blocks. All fstrim does it make sure it doesn't do that to *deleted* blocks.
    Although unless its a very very busy little disk, I am not sure how
    many of those there will actually be.

    My 128GB SSD gets fstrimmed once a week and typically shows that as
    affecting 1-2GB of storage on each run.

    This is a machine that doesn't obviously do a lot: its typical weeks
    workload is three items:

    1) rsync backup (read-only task)
    2) weekly dnf update run: its a Fedora box
    3) the rest of the time its running the protein Folding At Home
    application.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 13 22:11:49 2022
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 19:59:52 +0000, Chris Green wrote:

    Thanks, that's just the sort of info I'm after.

    I should have said that I use Sandisk SDs because they are among the few
    brands who make what they sell. They are now owned by Western Digital

    The manufacturing sources seem to be:

    Kioxia Formerly part of Toshiba.
    Kingston, Samsung and Seagate now own part of them

    Micron They own Crucial

    SK Hynix

    Western Digital They now own Sandisk

    ...which would *seem to show* that genuine Kingston, Crucial and Sandisk
    SD cards are fine, but who knows what's in other brands of SD cards.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Thu Jan 13 22:55:26 2022
    On 13/01/2022 21:41, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:30:18 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

    So the SSD must take static data and move it to higher wear blocks. All
    fstrim does it make sure it doesn't do that to *deleted* blocks.
    Although unless its a very very busy little disk, I am not sure how
    many of those there will actually be.

    My 128GB SSD gets fstrimmed once a week and typically shows that as
    affecting 1-2GB of storage on each run.

    This is a machine that doesn't obviously do a lot: its typical weeks
    workload is three items:

    Does it do log file rotation?

    Even my Pis SD card stores log files. It will kill it eventually

    see what ls -l /var/log shows you...
    And du -sh /var/log

    I see around 655Mbytes of log files rotated nightly on this machine
    (intel desktop with ssd)

    fstrim seems to reveal no data to trim, so lord knows what is doing it...
    Oh. The evil systemd is.

    $more /lib/systemd/system/fstrim.timer

    [Unit]
    Description=Discard unused blocks once a week
    Documentation=man:fstrim
    ConditionVirtualization=!container

    [Timer]
    OnCalendar=weekly
    AccuracySec=1h
    Persistent=true

    [Install]
    WantedBy=timers.target



    1) rsync backup (read-only task)
    2) weekly dnf update run: its a Fedora box
    3) the rest of the time its running the protein Folding At Home
    application.




    --
    Any fool can believe in principles - and most of them do!
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Fri Jan 14 00:43:01 2022
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:55:26 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

    On 13/01/2022 21:41, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    This is a machine that doesn't obviously do a lot: its typical weeks
    workload is three items:

    Does it do log file rotation?

    Of course - I've never seen a Linux system that didn't, though if you
    only run it for an hour or so a day, its timers might not have got round
    to doing log management so soon after booting.

    The systems here that run 24/7 swap logs around 01:00 while my usual
    laptop, which is always on but quiescent, lid shut, when not being used, usually doesn't release the previous day's logwatch report until a couple
    of hours after I've woken it up.

    Even my Pis SD card stores log files. It will kill it eventually

    All RPis have the log management tools installed by default but IIRC I
    had to install the logwatch system (log analyser and reporter) as well as
    a Postfix MTA so the Pi could, along with the other systems on my LAN, e-
    mail a daily logwatch report to my laptop so I'll see them when its woken
    up the next day, or whenever.

    I see around 655Mbytes of log files rotated nightly on this machine
    (intel desktop with ssd)

    Seems like a lot.

    This laptop has around 50 different logs in /var/log and its
    subdirectories at present. These amount to 26 MB in total, so it seems
    that you don't have 'logrotate' installed and enabled. It is needed to
    keep the number and size of logfiles under control.

    My logfiles are all organised as the current logfile plus the previous 4 generations and managed by the 'logrotate' overnight task, which gets automatically run when the machine is booted if it wasn't running at 1 AM
    last night or hasn't been run for more than 24 hours.

    If you want to see the daily reports, which I think is a good idea, you
    should also have an MTA installed on every system: I use Postfix. For convenience I have these Postfix instances configured to route all email through my house server, which runs 24/7. This way, all the machines on
    my LAN send mail to my house server's MTA , which also receives incoming
    mail from my ISP after passing it through the excellent SpamAssassin
    spamtrap. Incoming mail, whether received from my ISP or from other
    machines on my LAN is held until its wanted.

    This laptop runs the Evolution MUA, which collects incoming mail from my
    house server's mail queue and routes outgoing mail through it.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From druck@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Fri Jan 14 21:44:14 2022
    On 14/01/2022 00:43, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:55:26 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

    On 13/01/2022 21:41, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    This is a machine that doesn't obviously do a lot: its typical weeks
    workload is three items:

    Does it do log file rotation?

    Of course - I've never seen a Linux system that didn't,

    Log rotation is set up automatically for most installed programs, but
    its not if the user enabled rsyslogging for their own program, or has
    set up a filter of something to a different file to reduce the amount of
    crap in syslog. So its worth checking /var/log for anything that's grown
    huge.

    My logfiles are all organised as the current logfile plus the previous 4 generations and managed by the 'logrotate' overnight task, which gets automatically run when the machine is booted if it wasn't running at 1 AM last night or hasn't been run for more than 24 hours.

    I make sure my nightly Raspberry Pi backups occur after a log rotate, as
    that normally accounts for most of the data written. I graph the rsync
    stats as the if the amount of data increases considerably, its normally something thrashing the log files, which mean something is wrong.

    ---druck
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to druck on Fri Jan 14 22:00:06 2022
    On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 21:44:14 +0000, druck wrote:

    On 14/01/2022 00:43, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    On Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:55:26 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

    On 13/01/2022 21:41, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    This is a machine that doesn't obviously do a lot: its typical weeks
    workload is three items:

    Does it do log file rotation?

    Of course - I've never seen a Linux system that didn't,

    Log rotation is set up automatically for most installed programs, but
    its not if the user enabled rsyslogging for their own program, or has
    set up a filter of something to a different file to reduce the amount of
    crap in syslog. So its worth checking /var/log for anything that's grown huge.

    True enough - done that myself: have the program make logging calls that
    append messages to the logfile and extend the logrotate configuration to
    manage the size of the new logfiles and only keep the appropriate number
    of old logfiles.

    My logfiles are all organised as the current logfile plus the previous
    4 generations and managed by the 'logrotate' overnight task, which gets
    automatically run when the machine is booted if it wasn't running at 1
    AM last night or hasn't been run for more than 24 hours.

    I make sure my nightly Raspberry Pi backups occur after a log rotate, as
    that normally accounts for most of the data written. I graph the rsync
    stats as the if the amount of data increases considerably, its normally something thrashing the log files, which mean something is wrong.

    Same here.
    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)