Freeing Up Space on SBS 2008 Installations

Several of our customers with domains run on SBS 2008, a decent option for those wanting Exchange on-site. However, a few servers that have been in service for a while had started to alert our Nagios server that space on their C: partitions was getting low. On one server, we had previously moved both the WSUS database and content repository the last time space was shrinking, so we had to dig a little deeper to find a solution.

Nagios reported increasingly shrinking free space from Jan. 30 through Feb. 5, so we used the advanced search in Windows to find all files with a modified date after Jan. 29 and then sorted by size. We were surprised to find the log file for WSS 3.0 that is packaged with SBS 2008 had grown to over 25GB(!) in size. Google led me to a KB article from Microsoft describing the problem and thankfully providing a fix (an SQL script which executes a SHRINKFILE on the offending log file). Doing this gave us back most of the 25GB on C: that the log file was consuming, and left Nagios (and us) very pleased.