We’ve noticed an issue on some of our Unix servers lately. This may not be completely security related (unless of course we’re talking about the availability of a system). We have noticed on quite a few occurrences lately that the disk space on our Unix servers has started to grow out of control to the point where the availability of the system was at risk. Sometimes this happens because of log files that grow too large, databases grow larger than expected, or backups don’t rotate like we planned. But in any case the result is the same – disk drives start filling up to the point where there isn’t much disk space left.
So a while ago we implemented a few BASH scripts to check for free disk space and then report that disk utilization to the help desk on a regular, automated basis. Using the following simple Unix shell commands, we started reporting on the disk utilization for each of our systems.
Information on the installed physical disks on a system:
fdisk -l | head -2 | grep Disk
Information on the installed physical partitions on a system:
fdisk -l | tail -8 | awk '/dev/ { print $1 " " $5 " " $7 }'
Information on the available free disk space on a system:
df -h | awk '{if ($1 != "Filesystem" && $1 != "none") print $1 " " $5}'
Now, if you want to automated these scripts, I would recommend using the Cron or Anacron services to run these commands on a daily or weekly basis. For the reporting side, I really like the tool “SendEmail” for Unix and Windows systems to generate the email. But certainly that’s just a matter of preference.
You might also consider adding these commands to your Unix baseline script. That way during a baseline activity or during an audit you can gather info on disk utilization as well.