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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

brianschrader.com

561–570 of 715 posts

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

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Prejuduces often have some foundations, but that doesn’t mean that we should accept them before acknowledging them on a case-by-case basis.

We should not let so many people “get lost” without a sane social net.

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

#562
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 was in the army, they had a certain budget for bullets. Last day of the year we shoot the rest because if not they would get less next year. We shot so much we destroyed some of the rifles, apparently that was better than getting a smaller allocation next year.

Did you have a budget for replacement rifles too? Unlike bullets, there might be some incentive to get new and different ones.

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

#563
post #307
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've seen this in my country as well, thought it was a balkan thing.

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

#564
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…

Same thing happens with floating licenses, if they are too scarce, people open the program first thing in the morning ‘just in case’ and keep a license reserved all day.

I guess that's the reason Qlik (a business intelligence software provider) started using licensing by the minute - yes, like a phone call.

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extra failsafe? You can do both. What if your cron/netdata are not forwarding emails for some reason (eg nullmailer gets errors from Mailgun)?

Right, but again, what good does the spacer file do if you're not aware that you're running low on disk space? That is: if your monitoring isn't working, how do you know that you need to quickly make room? And if your monitoring is working correctly, the spacer file really serves no purpose other than lowering the available disk space.

because sometimes you run things that don't really need monitoring.

I run bunch of websites for pet projects and for friends clubs etc. They don't need monitoring, and even if they go down for couple of hours (or days) doesn't really matter.

I do monitor them, but mostly as an excuse to test various software, that I don't get you use during my day job (pretty sure that bunch of static sites and low use forums don't need elstic cluster, for log storage :) )

And sometims you simply don't have the time to deal with this right now. So you do a quick hack, and do it later.

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

#566
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…

At school we had a 800Mb quota for each class (around 90 people). Usually the first year everyone discovered the space problem when trying to get everything done for your first project. When you cannot compile code or generate pdf because there's no space left the witch hunt starts: there's always some people with left-over files from .pdf to .tex conversions.

To help some students had put in place a crawler making statistics about who was using the space for all classes. And usually once bitten you made your own space requisition script which would take any byte left when available until it hit some reasonable size.

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

#567
post #433
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, those goals are rarely communicated and accepted by the people they're imposed on. My first full-time job had an unexplained email expiry policy. After being frustrated several times at losing some explanation on how/why, I started forwarding all my emails to gmail. In retrospect, that's probably a worse result to whoever imposed the expiration. Fortunately, these days people are better about consolida…

It’s a hush hush kind of thing. You advertise it’s to avoid discovery and you are openly admiting to liability should someone find out while trying to pull your execs email during discovery. The excuse of resource contention provides plausible deniability

Yeah, this is really common. Normally there'll be one unrecorded/easily deleted means of communication, and people use that for discussing things that potentially could expose the company to legal liability.

But nobody ever talks about it (except on said un-recorded meetings. That reminds me, I should explain this to our junior today, so that he knows for the future).

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

#569
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archiving is likely solving the wrong problem, for legal reasons they don’t want those old emails hanging around.

Sounds like the retention policy is also solving the wrong problem. If for legal reasons you want to destroy any potential evidence, maybe it's a good idea to stop doing illegal actions.

It's not necessarily illegal actions, just those that would look bad in discovery. Lawyers (as always) tend to err on the side of caution.

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you wake up with a full disk. What did the spacer accomplish?

It allows me to remove that big file, then I'm able to run sudo since I don't allow root ssh and sudo won't work with a full disk, then I can clear up space on the system, bring it up again, then update log rotate or do whatever to prevent that case from happening again.

That sounds a lot more complicated (and time consuming) than just having monitoring in place, realizing the disk is filling up and fixing it before it leads to downtime.
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