Routine Filesystem Administration Tasks

Routine Filesystem Administration Tasks

To administer filesystems, you need to do the following:

Monitor the amount of free space and free inodes available.
If a filesystem is chronically short of free space, take steps to alleviate the problem, such as removing old files and imposing disk usage quotas.
Periodically check EFS filesystems for data integrity using fsck. (XFS filesystems are checked with xfs_check only when a problem is suspected.)
Back up filesystems.

Many routine administration jobs can be performed by shell scripts. Here are a few ideas:

Use a shell script to investigate free blocks and free inodes, and report on filesystems whose free space dips below a given threshold.
Use a shell script to automatically "clean up" files that grow (such as log files).
Use a shell script to highlight cases of excessive disk use.

All of these scripts can be run automatically by the cron command and the output sent to you using electronic mail. Typically, these scripts use some combination of the find, du, Mail, and shell commands.

The process accounting system performs many similar functions. If the process accounting system does not meet your needs, examine the scripts in /usr/lib/acct, such as ckpacct and remove, for ideas about how to build your own administration scripts.