Hi. We have several hundred servers that recently received the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 update. One of the differences we noticed is that the yum caches are consuming more space than they were before. The issue appears to be the existence of caches that did not exist prior to the update, and they exist in all four cache directories:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30832046 Aug 5 05:26 filelists.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 160432128 Aug 7 12:01 filelists.xml.gz.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87140371 Aug 5 05:26 other.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 365091840 Aug 7 12:02 other.xml.gz.sqlite
Comparing this to the 5.6 systems we still have:
/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-5:
cachecookie packages primary.xml.gz.sqlite updateinfo.xml.gz
comps.xml primary.xml.gz repomd.xml
/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-supplementary-5:
cachecookie comps.xml packages primary.xml.gz primary.xml.gz.sqlite repomd.xml
/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-vt-5:
cachecookie comps.xml packages primary.xml.gz primary.xml.gz.sqlite repomd.xml
/var/cache/yum/rhn-tools-rhel-x86_64-server-5:
cachecookie packages primary.xml.gz primary.xml.gz.sqlite repomd.xml
Reviewing the Red Hat release documentation for 5.7 revealed nothing about this change, and neither did the official yum documentation for this release.
Cleaning out the caches will only remove them temporarily. After a check-in with the RHN satellite, they build back up. Has anyone else experience this behavior or do you know why these new cache files appeared with 5.7? :wall:
Thanks.
Update: This is a reported bug, 729657 – rhn_check fills /var by attempting to do a full download of the metadata