Just installed Debian Hamradio Pure Blend, and I thought a 20GB partition for / would be plenty, but after a day I was getting disk full errors. So I shrunk my /home partition and extended my / partition up to 50GB. A day later it was at 100% again (I had just deleted some log file files to free up some space):
kev@kh-debian:/var/log$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda9 58G 53G 2.5G 96% / /dev/sda10 20G 279M 19G 2% /home
Guessing something was up, I cd’d into /var/log to see what was showing up in my log files and was surprised to see this:
kev@kh-debian:/var/log$ ls -lS total 49743852 -rw-r----- 1 root adm 15123453253 Dec 24 18:37 syslog -rw-r----- 1 root adm 13204397200 Dec 24 18:37 kern.log -rw-r----- 1 root adm 12416440518 Dec 24 18:37 daemon.log -rw-r----- 1 root adm 10053382069 Dec 24 18:37 messages -rw-r----- 1 root adm 139506083 Dec 23 07:04 syslog.2.gz -rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 292292 Dec 24 18:33 lastlog
Ok, ok. That’s where my disk space has gone.
Looking in syslog, I’ve got these messages repeating about 100 times a second:
Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian wpa_supplicant[862]: wlan0: Failed to initialize driver interface Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian NetworkManager[696]: <error> [1482634501.576472] [supplicant-manager/nm-supplicant-interface.c:856] interface_add_cb(): (wlan0): error adding interface: wpa_supplicant couldn't grab this interface. Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian NetworkManager[696]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: starting -> down Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian kernel: [ 2026.757616] ieee80211 phy0: rt2x00lib_request_firmware: Info - Loading firmware file 'rt73.bin' Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian kernel: [ 2026.757646] rt73usb 1-7:1.0: firmware: failed to load rt73.bin (-2) Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian kernel: [ 2026.757652] rt73usb 1-7:1.0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2 Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian kernel: [ 2026.757656] rt73usb 1-7:1.0: Falling back to user helper Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian wpa_supplicant[862]: Could not set interface wlan0 flags (UP): Cannot allocate memory Dec 24 18:55:01 kh-debian wpa_supplicant[862]: nl80211: Could not set interface 'wlan0' UP
Following the install instructions here: https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/rt73 – and then rebooted, problem solved. Log messages gone.