Question

A few days ago I decided to install MongoDB but, right after I installed it problems started happening. I outline exactly how I installed MongoDB and all the problems that ensued soon after at this post at AskUbuntu.com I do want to mention that I talked to one of the people on the #mongodb IRC channel and they told me that MongoDB needs like 10GB to run.

Could that be why my Ubuntu’s root file system got full after MongoDB installation? Makes sense. If this is true and MongoDB is the issue, then how should I go about uninstalling MongoDB?

Also is there any way to keep MongoDB and save my Ubunutu 10.04? Or should I do a clean install of Ubuntu but give it more room thank just 10GB?

UPDATE 1

cd / && du -hcs *

8.4M …. bin
34M ….. boot
4.0K ….. cdrom
625M … data
312K … dev
17M …. etc
45G …. home
0 ……… initrd.img
0 ……… initrd.img.old
275M .. lib
13M …. lib32
0 ……… lib64
16K ….. lost + found
3.9M … media
4.0K …. mnt
442M … opt
0 ………. proc
1.2M …. root
7.3M …. sbin
4.0K …. selinux
204K … srv
0 ………. sys
12K …… tmp
5.2G …. usr
2.5G …. var
0 ………. vmlinuz
0 ………. vmlinuz.old
54G …… total

UPDATE 2

This is what happened when I tried to remove mongodb:

s3z@s3z-laptop:/$ sudo apt-get purge mongodb mongodb-server mongodb-clients mongodb-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package mongodb is not installed, so not removed
E: Couldn't find package mongodb-server

This is strange because I can start up mongoDB’s shell:

s3z@s3z-laptop:/$ mongo 
MongoDB shell version: 2.0.2
connecting to: test
> 

How come this is happening?

Answer 1

You can probably just run apt-get purge mongodb mongodb-server mongodb-clients mongodb-dev mongodb-10gen to remove almost all references to MongoDB and all its data. There will still be some references to MongoDB in the /var/lib/ and /var/log/ directories which can be deleted manually.

For future installs of MongoDB, you might want to put its home directory (and thereby its associated data) onto your /home partition, which still has plenty of free space. Heck, you could still move its data if you wanted. Up to you.

Do you have any idea how I could find out what is filling my disk up?

The easiest way is the du(1) command, which will report the disk used for files and directories.

du -mx / | sort -n | less

The last lines will be the directories that have taken up the most space. The -x keeps it on one file system — I presume you don’t care so much about /home yet. The -m reports output in megabytes; if you want output in kilobytes instead, use -k. (I figure if you’re tracking down ten gigabytes of content, you’ll want to look for megabytes.)