Home of the Soul Cookie

I can’t use this information (yet), but I figured I’d post it for any Acolytes of the Apple that might be reading this.

Seems that Ian ”isnoop” Anthony’s MacBook was slowing down even as it was heating up, peaking at 170°F. As he chronicles in his blog post, Preventing an OSX Log File Meltdown:

I know that claims of hot MacBooks have become quite passe, but my laptop was literally hot enough on the bottom to burn me. At idle, CPU load averaged at around 1.50 and the harddrive was constantly writing according to the activity monitor. I brought this situation to the Apple forums and promptly recieved the answer.

Apparently Apple overlooked several logfiles when they set up the log rotation scripts in /etc/weekly. The texfile /var/log/samba/log.nmbd had topped 100 million lines in a month. The file measured 6.8GB before I removed it.

Ian’s got a step-by-step procedure to get all the logs a-rotating correctly. Looks like useful stuff.

Read the full HOWTO here.