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48 Chapter 6 Working With Disks and Volumes
Monitoring Disk Space
When you need more vigilant monitoring of disk space than the log rolling scripts
provide, you can use the diskspacemonitor command-line tool. It lets you monitor
disk space and take action more frequently than once a day when disk space is critically
low, and gives you the opportunity to provide your own action scripts.
diskspacemonitor is disabled by default. You can enable it by opening a Terminal
window and typing sudo diskspacemonitor on. You may be prompted for your
password. Type man diskspacemonitor for more information about the command-
line options.
When enabled, diskspacemonitor uses information in a configuration file to
determine when to execute alert and recovery scripts for reclaiming disk space:
• The configuration file is /etc/diskspacemonitor/diskspacemonitor.conf. It lets you
specify how often you want to monitor disk space and thresholds to use for
determining when to take the actions in the scripts. By default, disks are checked
every 10 minutes, an alert script executed when disks are 75% full, and a recovery
script executed when disks are 85% full. To edit the configuration file, log in to the
server as an administrator and use a text editor to open the file. See the comments in
the file for additional information.
• By default, two predefined action scripts are executed when the thresholds are
reached.
The default alert script is /etc/diskspacemonitor/action/alert. It runs in accord with
instructions in configuration file /etc/diskspacemonitor/alert.conf. It sends email to
recipients you specify.
The default recovery script is /etc/diskspacemonitor/action/recover. It runs in accord
with instructions in configuration file /etc/diskspacemonitor/recover.conf.
See the comments in the script and configuration files for more information about
these files.
• If you want to provide your own alert and recovery scripts, you can. Put your
alert script in /etc/diskspacemonitor/action/alert.local and your recovery script in
/etc/diskspacemonitor/action/recovery.local. Your scripts will be executed before the
default scripts when the thresholds are reached.
To configure the scripts on a server from a remote Mac OS X computer, open a Terminal
window and log in to the remote server using SSH.
LL2354.book Page 48 Monday, October 20, 2003 9:47 AM