Forum OpenACS Q&A: file size limit when su'ing

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1: file size limit when su'ing
Posted by Brad Ford on 07/17/01 04:05 PM
Hi all,

I'm in the process of installing 3.25 to try out as an intranet at
work. I did a fress install of RH 7.1 and am getting an error I
haven't seen before (nothing to do with acs). When trying to su to
another user from the super user when running an xterm window under
both gnome and kde (doesn't occur if running directly from the
terminal), the following error occurs:

#su postgres
file size limit reached

Any idea what file this is referring to and which conf file would
have the limit hard coded? Also, if no-one can answer that question,
how about this as a bandaid fix - is it possible to jump from
Xwindows to a terminal and back again via the function keys or some
other mechanism?

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2: Response to file size limit when su'ing (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 07/17/01 11:02 PM
ctrl-alt-f1 will get you to text mode console (f1 to f6 are the six text mode consoles), ctrl-alt-f7 wil get you back to X.

I would check for any really huge files on the machine, and for any ulimit limits that seem unusually low (ulimit -a will display them, so you can compare values when under X vs in a text mode console).

I'd also check the log files especially /var/log/messages for more precise error messages that may be relevant.

As a point of reference, I don't see this on my RH 7.1 boxes that have OpenACS 3.2.5 on them.

Is it only the postgres user that is affected, eg can you do

su brad

OK (assuming you have a user account named brad)?

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3: Response to file size limit when su'ing (response to 1)
Posted by Robert Ezman on 07/24/01 10:51 PM
An extension of the "Is it only the postgres user..." question above.

I've found that the log file produced by postgres gets really huge.  I changed my startup file to divert the postmaster output to a file rather than /dev/null.  It gets huge when you've had postgres up for a while.  So the first thing that comes to mind is to check if the output from postgress is being sent to a file.  And if it's over the quota or just generally huge.

On a side note/question.  Does anybody have a good strategy for rolling the postgres log?  Is there some better way to do logging with Postgres?