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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

#421

Post by Sn0wCoder »

osrec wrote: post #406
njovin wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to how some government agencies retain their budgets. At the end of the budget period they've only spent 80% of their allocated budget, so they throw out a bunch of perfectly good equipment/furniture/etc. and order new stuff so that their budget doesn't get cut the following year, rather than accepting that maybe they were over-budgeted to begin with. Rinse, repeat, thus continuing the cycle of wastin…

Reminds me of this episode of The office: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surplus

Thanks for the recommendation. Going to watch it tonight.

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

#422

Post by Cullinet »

DevKoala wrote: post #266
frenchy wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Property ownership comes at a cost. Sort-of. Typically there is a cost associated with getting rights over a property, either by manufacturing, or in the case of land, by purchase or through the efforts of settling. However, once you have ownership of a property, it's usually relatively cheap to continue own (except, I suppose, if you consider the risk of a communist revolution or something). This is esentially how…

In California you pay ~1.5% in property taxes per year. Owning property is not cheap. In fact you never really own it.

I'm a brit who was only discouraged from the process of becoming a American (when much younger and on a terrific upwards trajectory which crazy events eventually skewered) and I would be hurt particularly by property tax now and actually the moment my income ceased growing.

I can't remember if Florida doesn't have property tax and that then may explain why so many of my family retired there, but everywhere I wanted to live did.

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

#423

Post by mgfist »

ABeeSea wrote: post #300
twistedpair wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a large company during a migration from Lotus to Outlook. We were told we'd get our current Lost email storage + 100MiB as a new email quota limit under Outlook. I made a bunch of 100MiB files of `/dev/random` noise (so they don't compress, compressed size was part of the quota) and emailed them to myself before the migration, to get a few GiB of quota buffer. My co-workers were constantly having to delet…

Email quotas aren’t just a cost thing. It forces deletion of files/communications that aren’t relevant anymore. The last thing the legal department wants is some executive’s laptop with 10 years of undeleted email to make it’s way to discovery.

Sane companies just have retention policies instead of doing some obtuse hack like this.

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

#424

Post by louloulou »

victor9000 wrote: post #163
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…

Perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. If individuals don't create these balloon files then they won't be able to use the file server when they need it, yet by creating these balloon files the collective action depletes the shared resource of its main function.

If only there was some way to allocate resources based on their value to the user, like with prices or something.

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

#425

Post by Cullinet »

Kaze404 wrote: post #294
jsmith99 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that market mechanisms are meant to allocate items to those that value them the most (assumed to be the same as their willingness to pay). Claiming a licence by contrast has little cost.

I think a homeless person values an empty house way more than a real estate owner.

not by the way they seem to treat any property I've seen and I have experience of homelessness personally and the prejudices have rational foundation

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

#426

Post by pishpash »

Aeolun wrote: post #383
njovin wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to how some government agencies retain their budgets. At the end of the budget period they've only spent 80% of their allocated budget, so they throw out a bunch of perfectly good equipment/furniture/etc. and order new stuff so that their budget doesn't get cut the following year, rather than accepting that maybe they were over-budgeted to begin with. Rinse, repeat, thus continuing the cycle of wastin…

I think the problem is that you do not need 100% of your budget every year, but getting it back when you do need it is much harder than keeping it in the first place. Definite case of misaligned incentives.

If only there was a way to get things only when you need, like trading.

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

#427

Post by Cullinet »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #338
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…

Okay, that is hilarious. I use some scripts that monitor disk space, and monitor disk usages by "subsystem" (logs, mail, services, etc) using Nagios. And as DevOps Borat says, "Disk not full unless Nagios say 'Disk is full'" :_) Although long before it is full it starts warning me. It doesn't go off very much, but it did when I had a bunch of attacks on my web server that started core dumping and that filled up disk…

I thought it was standard to never write logs to the same machine and to worm for that matter

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

#428

Post by variable11 »

louloulou wrote: post #424
victor9000 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. If individuals don't create these balloon files then they won't be able to use the file server when they need it, yet by creating these balloon files the collective action depletes the shared resource of its main function.

If only there was some way to allocate resources based on their value to the user, like with prices or something.

That's systemic racism! /s

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

#429

Post by chihuahua »

agumonkey wrote: post #388
chihuahua wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am far from an expert on game theory, but it seems that the cause of the tragedy of the commons is that people can use the shared resource for free. If there was a price to be paid, and the price was dynamically adjusted depending on conditions, then the overuse could be avoided. Similarly for file storage and "reserving" it by creating huge but useless files. If everyone was charged a fee per gigabyte per day, the…

I was wondering if not all of human society is game theory through time/space taxes and prices.

That is how economists view the world.

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

#430

Post by dilyevsky »

geocrasher wrote: post #164
dilyevsky wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setup proper monitoring and never get to the Real Issue to begin with. These sysadmin hacks are not helpful

In a perfect world, this is true. But we don't have one of those.

That’s not perfect world this is standard industry practice to have host level monitoring
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