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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

#551

Post by kaba0 »

ycombinete wrote: post #518
eevilspock wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragedy of the Commons is the libertarian "private property is essential" interpretation. It's a cynical take, assuming that human selfishness is the deepest of truths and that there is no use fighting it, that the best solution is to organize society around it. The conventional Game Theory take is that this is a prisoners dilemma, and everyone creating balloon.txt files are defecting. They are making the most ration…

It’s not just libertarians. I’m sure that even communists accept the premise of human self interest, but instead of private property their solution is for one all powerful government to own everything

Communism (as an end-goal) requires no governments. You are thinking of socialism.

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

#553

Post by devnonymous »

herbcso wrote: post #507
Aeolun wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never understood this about budgeting. So you allocate. A budget. These are fund YOU ARE PLANNING TO SPEND! So, OK, you DON'T spend them this year. Why the fuck don't you get to SAVE THAT MONEY!? No, instead you are punished for now spending it all and you cannot create a realistic budget for next year - why the hell not!? Sorry, but this frustrates the hell out of me! What am I missing here? What arcane bit of…

It is about opportunity costs. The budget you did not spend could have been spent elsewhere in the meantime and since it didn't get invested elsewhere, it's not a savings, that's a net loss, because of course anything less than 100% utilisation of 100% of "resources", 100% of the time is a loss .. Or some such.

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

#554

Post by ianmcgowan »

herbcso wrote: post #507
Aeolun wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never understood this about budgeting. So you allocate. A budget. These are fund YOU ARE PLANNING TO SPEND! So, OK, you DON'T spend them this year. Why the fuck don't you get to SAVE THAT MONEY!? No, instead you are punished for now spending it all and you cannot create a realistic budget for next year - why the hell not!? Sorry, but this frustrates the hell out of me! What am I missing here? What arcane bit of…

If you don't reduce your budget next year, what does "save that money" mean to a department in a company? If this year I have 105% of last year's budget (because they always go up), what am I supposed to do with the 20% surplus from last year? Most companies wouldn't even have a place in your cost center to track a surplus, it's such a foreign concept.

Zero based budgeting is one answer to the moral hazards of either over or under-estimating your budget on purpose. If each year you start with a blank spreadsheet and then add (with justification) expenses for the year, it avoids some of the pitfalls. Not a panacea however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_budgeting#Advantage...

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

#555

Post by apexalpha »

ryandrake wrote: post #147

A lot of tips in this thread are about how to better alert when you get low on disk space, how to recover, etc. but I'd like to highlight the statement: "The disk filled up, and that's one thing you don't want on a Linux server—or a Mac for that matter. When the disk is full nothing good happens." As developers, we need to be better at handling edge cases like out of disk space, out of memory, pegged bandwidth and pe…

I had this on my Ubuntu server... The NFS mount died for some reason and the downloading app wrote it all to the local filesystem, filling my SSD to the brink within minutes. By the time I ssh'd in the NFS had remounted, so it took ages to figure out where all that disk space actually was used since all dir scan tools would traverse into the NFS mount again.

It felt like everything was falling apart. As soon as I deleted something another app filled it up in minutes. Even Bash Tab completion breaks... There really should be a 98% disk usage threshold in Linux so that you can at least use all system tools to try and fix it.

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

#556

Post by kaba0 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #483
JustARandomGuy wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity: did people really experience empty grocery shelves or are phrases such as "rapidly disappeared" meant more as hyperbole? I live in a Chicago suburb, and while variety did decrease (I still can't get Coke Zero Cherry) the basics were always in stock throughout the pandemic time.

Some grocery items actually went into scarcity. Why? Because the channel mix changed, and distribution and packaging are channel-specific. For example, toilet paper is shipped to commercial customers in cardboard boxes, while retail customers by it in plastic-wrapped, branded, and SKU’d blocks of 4, 8, 12, etc. When everyone suddenly stopped going to offices and restaurants, demand plummeted in the commercial channel…

Toilet paper is interesting because it takes up lots of space, can’t be “compressed”, so most stores doesn’t store too much of them. That’s why they are the first thing to disappear.

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

#557

Post by ianmcgowan »

shard wrote: post #347
easton wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not just tell Exchange to delete any emails older than 5 years (or whatever your lawyers tell you to put)?

A previous company I worked for had a one month retention window in the email server. People just ended up storing email in their local machine's Outlook folder so they can refer to old emails.

Or for the more technical folk with access to a linux server, setup postfix/dovecot, connect outlook to it and arrange for archived emails to go to the IMAP server.

The IT people get smart about looking for OST or PST files, but let's see them catch that :-)

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

#558

Post by kaba0 »

martyvis wrote: post #457
frosted-flakes wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is fish not considered meat?

Not in some cultures. My youngest daughter isn't a big meat eater, and certainly hates seafood. She was on an organised tour to Spain with her youth orchestra so ticked the "vegetarian" box for meals. Inevitably her meal came with fish as the protein. Apparently in Spain, fish aren't considered as sentient like chicken or hoofed animals and hence are akin to vegetables.

It’s a Christian thing.

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

#559

Post by mellavora »

sgregnt wrote: post #461
lostlogin wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is similar to how some government agencies retain their budgets. The non-government sector isn’t immune to this.

If whatever actions turn a non government entity into something inefficient, then the entity wont survive for long and will go out of business (or at least that's the hope of a competitive free market economy)

Ann Rand, is that you?

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

#560

Post by indigomm »

nottorp wrote: post #536
herpderperator wrote: post #473

The author seems to forget that ext-based filesystems keep 5% of disk space available for root at all times by default, known as "reserved blocks".[0] That means if a non-root user uses all of the available space, it wasn't really all of the space -- root still has access to 5% free space within that partition. That's exactly the same as the useless 8GB file but in an officially-supported manner. If you run out of di…

> So log in as root and fix the issue. Simple. Except you can't ssh in as root any more. You have to ssh as a normal user then sudo in. Which may not be possible. A paid on call admin may not mind driving to the data center too much. Everyone else would.

You can login as root at the console on many providers. Even where not allowed (eg. AWS) you can mount the volume on another instance and clean it up from there.
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