Atomicorp

A recent yum update contained errors when updating.

raise Errors.YumBaseError, errors
yum.Errors.YumBaseError: [('installing package kernel-2.6.32.41-4.art.x86_64 needs 3MB on the /boot filesystem', (9, '/boot', 2408448L)), ('installing package kernel-2.6.32.41-4.art.x86_64 needs 3MB on the /boot filesystem', (9, '/boot', 2408448L))]

a du --si of /boot shows it to be 78M in total.
the contents of the /boot directory contain lots of very similar files, a small excerpt of this is shown below

Oct 25 2010 xen.gz-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5
Nov 9 2010 xen.gz-2.6.18-194.26.1.el5
Jan 5 22:45 xen.gz-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5
Apr 1 23:32 xen.gz-2.6.18-238.5.1.el5
Apr 12 23:03 xen.gz-2.6.18-238.9.1.el5

Would it be safe to remove the first three from that list? In general should I be OK to remove files with similar names excepting version? I suspect yes but don't want to make assumptions and then break everything. It seems odd that so many would be kept if they weren't needed for something.

Hi,

Its because you always install a new kernel rather than updating a previous one. Eventually your /boot fills up with these old kernels. You're probably ok to delete the files, but its not a neat way of doing things, instead you're better off doing this : http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-red ... l-command/

Paul.

How many kernel packages do you have installed? What is installonly_limit in /etc/yum.conf set to?

Thanks Paulie, we have it sorted out now.

breun wrote: How many kernel packages do you have installed? What is installonly_limit in /etc/yum.conf set to?

yum.conf install only was set to 5, if I set it to 3 I think that might prevent issues in the future whilst still allowing us to go back if required

In terms of various kernels we have loads. If you're interested we have:

• config, (.el5xen and .x86_64)
  initrd (el5xen.img and x86_64.img)
  system.map (el5xen, x86_64)
  vmlinuz (el5xen, x86_64)
  xen.gz (el5)
  xen-syms (el5)

No wonder it had filled up!

bananapar wrote:In terms of various kernels we have loads. If you're interested we have:

• config, (.el5xen and .x86_64)
  initrd (el5xen.img and x86_64.img)
  system.map (el5xen, x86_64)
  vmlinuz (el5xen, x86_64)
  xen.gz (el5)
  xen-syms (el5)

No wonder it had filled up!

Those are different files related to a single kernel release. What's the output of rpm -qa | grep kernel | sort?

This is it currently:
kernel-2.6.32.27-1.art.x86_64
kernel-2.6.32.28-1.art.x86_64
kernel-2.6.32.41-3.art.x86_64
kernel-2.6.32.41-4.art.x86_64
kernel-firmware-2.6.32.41-4.art.x86_64
kernel-headers-2.6.32.41-4.art.x86_64
kernel-xen-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5.x86_64
kernel-xen-2.6.18-238.12.1.el5.x86_64
kernel-xen-2.6.18-238.9.1.el5.x86_64
kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-238.12.1.el5.x86_64
kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-238.5.1.el5.x86_64
kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-238.9.1.el5.x86_64
yum-kernel-module-1.1.16-14.el5.centos.1.noarch

Are you using those Xen kernels? If not, I'd remove kernel-xen*, which will probably give you lots of space on /boot back.