Anyone else suffered a runaway "messages" log?

[Ripshod]

My wireless net went down yesterday afternoon. Once I managed to get the GUI loaded (V slow) it worked for a couple of seconds, long enough to see the 120GB USB drive was full. I had to shutdown over ssh.
I plugged the drive into my ubuntu lappy and after a little digging found the "messages" log was at 107.8GB after just 4hrs runtime, so something went awry. It was too big to open in a text editor so I just deleted it. Plugged it back into the router, booted it and everything has been fine since.
My question? With nothing I can directly point the finger at I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this?

 

[andyross]

Maybe it wasn't actually 107GB of messages, but something had corrupted the file system. Or some verbose logging had been turned on by mistake or other glitch.

 

[ColinTaylor]

The base stock and Merlin firmware doesn't create any log files on external USB drives so the "messages" file must have been created by some addon script that you're running. The contents of that file could have been accumulating for months, if not years. Shame that you deleted it because you could have just run tail on it to see the last entries.

 

[Ripshod]

Shame that you deleted it because you could have just run tail on it to see the last entries.

Noted for if it ever happens again.
It was a fresh install, only 4hrs old and yes it did build to 107.8 GB in those 4 hrs. I did notice on the frozen GUI page some add-ons hadn't loaded, so the assumption it was add-on makes sense. If the file system had been corrupted would it have been as easy as just deleting the file? Nothing showed in 'top' other than the locked-up httpd at 25% (I presume one core 100%) from the frozen GUI(?).

 

[ColinTaylor]

If the file system had been corrupted would it have been as easy as just deleting the file?

No, if the filesystem is corrupted it needs to be unmounted and repaired. Afterwards, if the contents of the file are corrupted it might also need to be deleted so stop any applications that read it getting confused or crashing.

 

[Ripshod]

Will do. Thanks

Here we go again