Multiple Home folders?

[Agrajag]

I'm on a VPS at Bluehost (and really shouldn't be, but that's a long story). It hosts two small Wordpress sites (total of about 4GB) and some e-mail accounts (about 3 GB) and it's a 30GB server and yet I ran out of space today and have always been up against the space limit. I could never figure out why.

Tonight I spoke with a helpful support rep (who pointed me here) who said I needed help because I have not only a Home folder, but also Home1, Home2 and more up to Home9 folders. I've never seen anything other than HOME and, as far as I know, that's all I use.

I basically just FTP into the server and do what I need and almost never go into root. I'm wondering if, perhaps, a wordpress dev along the way might have done something they shouldn't have.

My issue is that I'm not a network admin (though I used to be 35 years ago before they were called that). I can SSH into root (using Putty), but I'll be darned if I know what I'm looking at or looking for to help clear this up and, of course, in the meantime no one can post anything.

A directory of what I see in root:

admin
backup
bin
boot
cloud-init.complete
dev
etc
Git.pm
home
home1
home2
home3
home4
home5
home6
home7
home8
home9
lib
lib64
lost+found
media
mnt
opt
proc
razor-agent.log
root
sbin
scripts
selinux
srv
sys
tmp
usr
var

Is there some valid reason why these other home folders beyond the main "home" would be there?

Each one seems to be pretty much the same:

0_README_BEFORE_DELETING_VIRTFS
cPanelInstall
cpeasyapache
pcseren1
SYS-SNAP
virtfs

"pcseren1" is my main account.

If, for example, I CD into "home9/pcseren1/" I find my standard file structure that I find in "home" including my two wordpress installs and content from the most recent posts (in wp-content/uploads/).

All of them seem to be exact mirrors of one another. This clearly doesn't seem right and I can't imagine I have 9 copies of the site running as I'd be WAY over disk space. Can anyone help get me out of this hell to figure out why this is happening and where my disk space has gone?

Thanks....

 

[dalem]

without looking closer would have no idea why you have multiple homes, but guessing you used the rearrange account function without another drive?

when you cd /home and run a
ls -l
are any of the accounts symbolic links

 

[Agrajag]

when you cd /home and run a
ls -l
are any of the accounts symbolic links

When I do that in the "/home" directory I get what is nearly the same as I mentioned above -- 6 entries consisting of one warning file about deleting the virtfs file and five dark blue directory entries.

HOWEVER, and this seems curious. When I ls -l in the root is see these:

home
home 1 -> /home
home 2 -> /home
home 3 -> /home
home 4 -> /home
home 5 -> /home
home 6 -> /home
home 7
home 8 -> /home
home 9 -> /home

The symbolic links are all 5 bytes and home and home7 are both 4096. Curious how home7 isn't symbolic. WTH.

Looking at the inside of "/home7" I see it's just a symbolic link:

pcseren1 -> /home/pcseren1

What I'd like to ultimately find out is if these phantom folders are taking any space, any resources (has to be some overhead for keeping these all) and if they're safe to delete and if I can keep them from coming back. heheh

 

[Agrajag]

Out of curiosity I unlinked "/home6" and it didn't immediately come back, but we also haven't posted new content to the sites. Nor did the sites show any difference. It almost seems as if some errant code created these. I wish they'd show their own file dates so I could connect that with when we had any outside people doing work on the server.

 

[dalem]

symbolic links use no space
the helpful support rep should have realized that

 

[Agrajag]

In fairness to the rep, I think when he saw all those links he basically just said, "I need to not mess with this mess."

 

[cPanelLauren]

Hi @Agrajag

It sounds like at some point you (or someone) created separate home mounts. If you would like for us to look at it more closely please open a ticket using the link in my signature. Once open please reply with the Ticket ID here so that we can update this thread with the resolution once the ticket is resolved.


Thanks!