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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

brianschrader.com

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Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#301

Post by 0_____0 »

jessaustin wrote: post #188
0_____0 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

always fun when you're barreling down the highway and the engine starts to lean out, prompting you to hurriedly locate and switch the petcock over before the engine stalls completely. suppose then that you go fill up and forget to set the petcock back to normal. 8ball says: "I see a long walk in your future."

IME it doesn't take too many hikes to learn that part of the procedure for turning off the engine is "turn the fuel switch off reserve".

out of years of riding it's only happened to me a couple times.

one time i was eastbound on the bay bridge when my bike started to sputter. i'd just reassembled the tank and had left the screw-style reserve fuel valve open, so there was no reserve fuel to be had. a very kind lady put her blinkers on behind me and followed as i coasted the last few hundred yards toward yerba buena island.

i pushed my bike up the ramp and looked in the tank to assess. it's a dirtbike, so the tank has two distinct "lobes" to accomodate the top tube of the frame. I had a few ounces in the tank but they were not in the lobe with the fuel pickup, so i dumped the bike on its side to get the fuel to slosh over to where i wanted it.

i got back on the highway and, going quite slowly and gently, managed to get to the gas station at west oakland bart, the engine leaning out and sputtering right as i rolled into their lot.

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#302

Post by hprotagonist »

tehjoker wrote: post #141
geocrasher wrote: post #124

For everyone saying "This isn't a real solution!" I'd like to explain why I think you're wrong. 1) It's not intended to be a Real Solution(tm). It's intended to buy the admin some time to solve the Real Issue. 2) Having a failsafe on standby such as this will save an admin's butt when it's 2am and PagerDuty won't shut up, and you're just awake enough to apply a temp fix and work on it in the morning. 3) Because "FIX…

This reminds me of the reserve tank toggle on some motorcycles. When you run out of gas, you switch the toggle and drive directly to a gas station.

The bikes I've had that have had reserve tanks have also been old enough to raise the disconcerting follow-on question, which is: "is the reserve gas also full of sludgey crap that's settled in the tank and hasn't been disturbed really in a year, and am i about to run that through my poor carbs?"

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#303

Post by jedberg »

Since the late 90s, this was always my solution:

    tune2fs -m 2 /dev/hda1
That sets the root reserve on a disk. It's space that only root can use, but also you can change it on the fly. So if you run out of userland space you can make it smaller, and if a process running as root fill your disk, well, you probably did something real bad anyway. :)

But yeah, this is a pretty good hack.

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#304

Post by plank_time »

bane wrote: post #228
woko wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoarders will buy the rest of it. During the 2-month lockdown a year ago, I would purchase 4 frozen pizzas at a time when I had a chance to buy them, because I was so upset that I could not buy one when I wanted a single one during the 2 previous weeks, because of hoarders who had been faster than me. People think of toilet papers, but it is not just that. Pasta, rice, flour, yeast, plenty of useful things went missi…

The meat situation was kind of interesting actually. At the beginning of the lockdown I remember going shopping for lots of shelf-stable foods. Very perishable stuff like meat or fresh veggies were out or hard to find (and yes freezing meat works fine I know). However, lots of stores had tons of shelf stable boxed and canned goods and for meat jerky and other dried meats which are simple to boil and turn into simple…

I bought a bunch of rice, and all that happened was little rice bugs started living in it, so I had to throw it all away. But if there were a rice shortage, I would probably have eaten it.

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#306

Post by solidasparagus »

geocrasher wrote: post #124

For everyone saying "This isn't a real solution!" I'd like to explain why I think you're wrong. 1) It's not intended to be a Real Solution(tm). It's intended to buy the admin some time to solve the Real Issue. 2) Having a failsafe on standby such as this will save an admin's butt when it's 2am and PagerDuty won't shut up, and you're just awake enough to apply a temp fix and work on it in the morning. 3) Because "FIX…

This is one of those great solutions where they got 90% of the value of the Real Solution(tm) with 5 minutes of work.

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#307

Post by jachee »

bane wrote: post #212
rgj wrote: post #79

In the mid nineties I worked in a research institute. There was a large shared Novell drive which was always on the verge of full. Almost every day we were asked to clean up our files as much as possible. There were no disc quota for some reason. One day I was working with my colleague and when the fileserver was full he went to a project folder and removed a file called balloon.txt which immediately freed up a few p…

This is a surprisingly common hoarding behavior among humans using scarce resources. In technology you see it everywhere, virtualization infrastructure, disk storage, etc. This is actually kind of clever. How the tribal knowledge for how to "reserve space" was developed and disseminated would be pretty interesting to study.

In Pittsburgh, it's evolved into the parking chair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_chair

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#308

Post by innomatics »

badcc wrote: post #15

This trick has certainly saved me more times than I am willing to admit! I usually roll with: `fallocate -l 8G DELETE_IF_OUT_OF_SPACE.img`

Nice. I liked the trick in the article, but was wondering if it might confuse the next admin who needs to figure it out.

Was also thinking of customising the login greeting to mention the file (/etc/motd).

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#309

Post by jedberg »

hprotagonist wrote: post #302
tehjoker wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the reserve tank toggle on some motorcycles. When you run out of gas, you switch the toggle and drive directly to a gas station.

The bikes I've had that have had reserve tanks have also been old enough to raise the disconcerting follow-on question, which is: "is the reserve gas also full of sludgey crap that's settled in the tank and hasn't been disturbed really in a year, and am i about to run that through my poor carbs?"

My friend had a truck with a reserve tank, but it was the same size as the main tank, so he would just flip the switch at every fill up to make sure they both got used.

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#310

Post by _carbyau_ »

295310e0 wrote: post #57
SethTro wrote: post #31

Same idea as this game development legend https://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-dev... > he had put aside those two megabytes of memory early in the development cycle. He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to…

If true, I hate that story. Think of the better art assets that were needlessly left behind. How is it that said block of memory had never been identified by any profiling?

I see it as a "Choose your problem." affair.

1. Deal with possibly multiple issues possibly involving multiple people with the politics that entails resulting in a lot of stress for all involved as any one issue could render it a complete failure.

2. Have extra space you can decide to optimise if you want. You could even have politics and arguments over what to optimise, but if nothing happens it all still works so there is a lot less stress.

I pick 2.

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