Ubuntu boot partition running out of space….

Problem: /boot partition begins to fill and even after manual clean up, the problem reoccurs.

Solution: Initially clean the partition. The solution we have used is documented here and summarised below.

1. Get the current kernel version by executing
   • uname -r
2. List the kernels available, except the kernel currently in use
   • dpkg –list ‘linux-image*’|awk ‘{ if ($1==”ii”) print $2}’|grep -v uname -r
3. Based on the list returned by the command above, execute
   • apt-get purge linux-image–generic
4. Remove orphaned packages
   • apt-get autoremove
5. Did it work? The command in step 2 should return no results. Check boot partition space with
   • df -h | egrep “boot|Mounted on”

Once that’s done, it’s recommended to setup Automatic Maintenance as below:

1. Install the package unattended-upgrades
   • apt-get install unattended-upgrades
2. Configure unattended-upgrades
   • dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades
3. Make sure /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades contains line Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies “true”;cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades | grep Remove-Unused-Dependencies
   
   If the result is //Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies “false”;, then use your prefered editor to remove the // and change false to true.