Monitoring disk usage on a BSD box

February 12, 2006 8:00 AM

Is there something like Spacemonger for FreeBSD?

I use Spacemonger all the time to keep an eye on my Windows disk usage and weed out huge temp/log files etc. I also have root on a command-line FreeBSD box and I'm fed up with using du drilldowns to work out where all my space has gone. Is there something similar to spacemonger which I could use? I'm open to any suggestions: command line, web-interface, local (Windows) installation... Thanks.

posted by blag to computers & internet (9 comments total)

sysutils/kdirstat looks like what you're after. Others will doubtless be in the same section.
posted by Freaky at 8:10 AM on February 12, 2006

Baobab maybe? Never used it personally. And it's a Gnome tool, so it'll probably need a lot of stuff that's not installed on your server.
posted by reynaert at 8:13 AM on February 12, 2006

Thanks for the suggestions but both of those seem to require (KDE|Gnome) and my box is i) command-line only and ii) remote. Is there such a thing as a Windows app I could run on my local machine which would query the server remotely over SSH or something?
posted by blag at 10:38 AM on February 12, 2006

i've had success using spacemonger on a windows machine to analyze the diskspace on a mac on the same network. just connect to the mac as a network drive, and then tell spacemonger to look at that drive. not sure how this would work on freeBSD, but it could be worth a shot if you have the two boxes networked already.
posted by cathodeheart at 11:20 AM on February 12, 2006

It's very old school, but "du | xdu" is a 1 dimensional version that's worked on Unix machines for 15 years.
posted by Nelson at 1:22 PM on February 12, 2006

I'm fed up with using du drilldowns

By this I assume you mean something like "du | sort -n > sizes" right? The only thing this doesn't show you that spacemonger/etc does is the containment relations. Without sorting it, I can imagine it would be a pain, though.
posted by advil at 1:44 PM on February 12, 2006

To find large files, for instance, over 10mb:
find / -size +10000

You could output it to a file periodically, using cron, and do diff on two of the files to see what's new.

I have two cron jobs running weekly:

Disk space usage:
df >>/var/log/df.log
Then I do: grep /dev/sda6 df.log to see just the sda6 filesystem trends.

The top 20 files from my large data file directory:
cd /mybigfilesdirectory ; ls -s |sort -nr |head -20 >> /var/log/top20.log

This way I can see the usage trends over a long period of time.
posted by jjj606 at 3:50 PM on February 12, 2006

Thanks for the suggestions but both of those seem to require (KDE|Gnome) and my box is i) command-line only and ii) remote.

Uh, hello? X11? This is precisely the kind of situation it was designed to cope with. Install the X server on your local machine (e.g. Cygwin or Xming), ssh with "ssh -Y", run your app remotely and it will display locally. If they are not installed you will need to install the Gnome libs on the server, but that can all be done from the command line -- you aren't installing an X server, just the client libraries.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:32 PM on February 12, 2006

Thanks for all the answers.

I never got round to setting up X on the box so this might provide me with the impetus needed. If so, then xdu will be perfect, thanks Nelson.

I'm currently doing something similar to advil's suggestion but was hoping for a more graphical solution. Poking around in the category suggested by Freaky yielded Durep which might be perfect.

Thanks again, all.
posted by blag at 8:42 AM on February 13, 2006