yum cache and disk space

At a recent LCFG Deployers meeting we discussed a problem with yum not fully cleaning the cache directory even when the yum clean all command is used. This turns out to be related to how the cache directory path is defined in /etc/yum.conf as /var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever. As the release version changes with each minor platform release (e.g. 7.3, 7.4) the old directories can become abandoned. At first this might seem like a trivial problem but these cache directories can be huge, we have seen instances where gigabytes of disk space have been used and cannot be simply reclaimed. To help fix this problem I’ve added a new purgecache method to the LCFG yum component. This takes a sledgehammer approach of just deleting everything in the /var/cache/yum/ directory. This can be run manually whenever required or called regularly using something like cron. In Informatics it is now configured to run weekly on a Sunday like this:

!cron.objects             mADD(yum_purge)
cron.object_yum_purge     yum
cron.method_yum_purge     purgecache
cron.run_yum_purge        AUTOMINS AUTOHOUR * * sun

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