I utilize podman on my server for running my software.
Recently, I saw that my server ran out of space on its 8TB raid 10 array. Which immediately raised questions for me.
After using “duc” to analyze my drive. I found that podman had used 4 TB of storage space in “/var/tmp”.
Anyone else have this happen to them?
You must log in or # to comment.
Podman/docker leave behind old images, image layers, and containers that need to be cleaned up occasionally.
podman system prunewill do so.If 8TB was taken up quickly or unexpectedly, it might be something like a container failing to start and being recreated over and over, leaving each failed container behind as it goes.
podman ps --allwill list all containers, running or stopped. Before doing the system prune run that andpodman image ls --allto see if anything looks amiss.In my case I like to run most things in containers, and that includes a lot of ML shit. Since I’m on AMD nothing fucking works, so I accumulate all these huge multiple GB containers that don’t work because the whole ML/AI/GPU stack is a steaming pile.
I just deleted 600gb of cached intermediate container images today
It prompted me to just fresh install my os, which I’m doing right now.
Wait…wha?
What prompted you to reinstall your ENTIRE OS? That should almost never be necessary under any circumstances.
I’m still on-boarding to Linux, and I was on bazzite but a bunch of settings were messed up.
I migrated from docker to podman and for some reason half my flatpaks broke. Then my podman caches were insane, so my disk was filling up. And I had so e messed up settings, like sleep wasn’t working properly and would just show a black screen on resume.
OHHH…you didn’t get an actual on screen prompt, you just decided to reinstall. My bad.
Yes, I just wasn’t happy with the state of my machine. It felt like there were too many parts I didn’t understand, so I wanted to clear it all out and simplify systems.
New to Linux, what’s the fresh install process like? I understand the actual installation, but curious about the workflow of backing up, reconfiguring, etc.
Almost everything you care about should be in /home so back that up. Many people keep it on a separate partition or drive to make changing distros (or reinstalling the existing one) easier.
Most of your system config is in /etc so you may want to make a copy of that too.
But the proper process on Linux is not to re-install. It should not be necessary.
On top of this, part of the reasons to use containers is that you can create and destroy them at will while leaving your host tidy and stable. I use Distrobox quite a bit for this reason.
How do you use distrobox? I don’t get it yet.
I just try not to leave the shell lol.
Distrobox allows you to run an ‘os’ container essentially to install things in, then blow away when you’re done or no longer have a need. Its mostly used for mara messy programs or projects that you don’t want littering your main OS.
Not too bad.
I kind of dislike the installer though (after you complete each step you have to go back to the main page to do the next one, it’s more a nitpick on the UI flow).
Getting everything working is easy though, basically just click which disk to install and add a user profile. Click install and then click restart when done.
Overall it feels modern and normal.
If you have secure boot you might have to go do something in the bios, but there are usually guides, and windows would be the same.
/tmp should be just that (temporary).
There should not be any ill effects to completely empty /tmp
Some distros put /tmp on a ram drive that gets created fresh (and empty) with each reboot.
