Today I had an annoying message appear while doing apt updates. The message stated I only had 1.8gb free on my root partition. The partition has something like 50gb total, and I've barely put anything on it besides the OS and a few dozen apps (none of them very big). I fired up the Disk Usage Analyzer and found that /var/log was using a bit over 30gb on its own. So I took a closer look and found a 27gb and a 4 gb file, both of them being mediatomb log files.

I have had no luck with the ubuntu 9.10 and mediatomb so far. I've been using mediatomb for years, and except a few issues with getting it to start automatically on boot, I've never had any issues. Now I was getting some errors about a duplicate key while attempting to insert a song into the database (sqlite database). I haven't seen anything around the internets about this problem (but then again I haven't searched much).

I didn't bother to see what was in the log files as I'd prefer not to open a 27gb text file, but I can imagine mediatomb must have been writing data to this file constantly to get that big so fast. I've only had this OS install for several weeks and I don't leave my computer on 24x7.

So for now I've uninstalled mediatomb and deleted the pesky overbloated log files. Shouldn't these files be rolling over after they grow to a certain size. That's how every other logging system works that I've seen.

I'll try mediatomb again when 9.10 is final and see if I can get it running good. Until then it looks like I'll be running up and downstairs with a thumb drive in hand to transfer music/videos.