Friday, March 22, 2013

How to fix incorrect disk usage showing for a user in Cpanel


A customer complains that their reported disk usage is too high, that they are not using so much space. What do you do?

1. Get their username and login to WHM to see if WHM is actually reporting the amount of space usage they say. If WHM does show extreme disk usage....

2. Login to SSH and cd to their home directory
cd /home/theirusername

du -h

This will give a human readable display of folder by folder listing and space usage, with a total at the end. THIS WILL BE ACCURATE.

3. So, du -h shows a lower number than WHM? Then their is probably a backup file somewhere on the server with the same UID as this user.

4. Now, you need to locate the uid of the customer. You will need to know their username.

vi /etc/passwd

5. Once that file is open, run a search on their username

/theirusername

That will show a 5 digit number and a smaller number. The larger number should be the UID.

6. Now, go to shell and run the following command (where, in this example, 33025 is the UID of the user)

find / -uid 32025

A folder by folder listing will be displayed. It may take some time to process. When completed, you should scroll back through the output to find the files. Files in /home/username are fine as well as /etc/valiases, etc. LOOK for files in your backup directory that may have the same UID as your user. If found, that is usually the culprit.      

No comments:

Post a Comment