Debian Bug report logs - #245874
findutils: updatedb cron job does not report even critical errors

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Heikki Kantola <hezu+debian@iki.fi>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: findutils: updatedb cron job does not report even critical errors

Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 01:06:29 +0300

Package: findutils
Version: 4.1.20-3
Severity: important

As /etc/cron.daily/find redirects updatedb output to /dev/null, you
never get any notice if the locate-database building fails. Namely I
noticed today (by running updatedb manually) that because my computer's 
/var partition was too full, there was no locate database generated and
thus locate couldn't find anything. 

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.26-1-686-smp
Locale: LANG=en_DK, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI

Versions of packages findutils depends on:
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an

-- no debconf information

Message #18 received at 245874@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Carlo Wood <carlo@alinoe.com>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <245874@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: locate silently fails if partition full

Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:32:02 +0100

Package: locate
Version: 4.2.31-4
Followup-For: Bug #245874

I had the exact same problem. As a result, I haven't been able
to use locate for a long time, until I finally found the time
to dig into this. All this time, locate was run from cron,
producing no errors and an empty database (Causing 'locate' to
return nothing for whatever query).

At the very least this problem should be mentioned in
the Debian.README file. There is a work around for it.
By default, 'sort' is using /var/tmp, which is 1GB large
on my system. If that partition runs full, locate silently fails.
If you have a larger partition that can be used for temporary
files (ie, /tmp), you can add "export TMPDIR=/tmp" to
/etc/updatedb.findutils.cron.local and it will use that.

However, at least as important is the fact that a temp file
of several GIGA bytes is necessary at all. I can imagine
that not everyone has a 10 GB tmp partition like me, especially
not on encrypted systems (where also tmp has to be encrypted)
a tmpfs is being used that uses the (encrypted) swap, normally.
Perhaps I have more files than others, but it's that special.
I'm just using my PC to develop open source stuff.
I had /etc/cron.daily/locate running while typing this, and
it's currently at:

Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                   11G   2.7G   8.1G  26% /tmp
tmpfs                  1.1G      0   1.1G   0% /var/tmp

2.7 GB and growing! I hope it will be done before 11G, or
I'd start to expect something else to wrong :/ (before starting
it, /tmp was using 33 MB).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages locate depends on:
ii  findutils                     4.2.31-4   utilities for finding files--find,
ii  libc6                         2.7-6      GNU C Library: Shared libraries

locate recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

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