Fedora Linux ships, among many, a very useful utility – diskcheck. This RPM installs only two files:
/etc/diskcheck.conf
– small and asimple configuration file for the script/etc/cron.hourly/diskcheck
– the script itself
diskchek periodically (hourly, by default) checks free space on all partitions and sends a notification email to the administrator (root) reporting any partitions with less than 10% of free disk space. If all paritions have enough disk space it will just keep silent. Which partitions to check/skip, how much free disk space to consider as a warning point, and where to send the email – all of these can be easily tuned via the configuration file.
This tool, while being extremely small, provides a great service – proactive notification. Thing like this can solve lots and lots of headaches while troubleshooting strange behaviours.