YUM Cache causing full /var issues.

[theBassTender]

I've been experiencing some issues with my /var partition becoming 100% full, preventing email delivery and other issues. Digging deeper, I noticed the /var/cache directory was over 2 gigs in size. With my /var partition set at 5 gigs, you could see where this could be a problem.

Since all of this began with the cPanel 11 upgrades, I suspected it was package updates. (I'm running CentOS 4.6) When I ran 'yum clean all', lo and behold, /var/cache dropped down to 2 megs.

My question is this - should I make changes to the yum.conf to prevent the cache from growing to such unwieldy sizes? If so, would there be a downside to this? I must note, the yum.conf is in its default state.

Thanks for any input you may have.

[chirpy]

I haven't seen a case where the yum cache was that large. I'd only have expected it to grow that significantly if there was a major OS update and would have thought that a quick clean after that happening would be all you need. The yum configuration talks about turning off http caching, but whether that would help depends on what, in the cache, was consuming the space.

If it's a perpetual problem on that one server, then you could setup a simple cron job to just flush the cache on a regular basis and/or move the cache directory to a more spacious partition.