I keep my databases on a separate filesystem from root, var, or anything system critical for this reason. Even with the 8GB space waster, if you aren't on top of your disk usage you'd have down time when you fill up the filesystem containing the DB. I might be missing something here, but this does not seem like a good solution to this problem.
All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
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Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#442Earlier 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.
Lotus to Exchange migrations were all likely in the pre-Sarbanes Oxley and other retention regular era of email retention requirements
iirc at the time the only industries that required retention were health, legal and government
With SOX (PCI, FDIC, et al) retention laws we had another explosion of work rolling out all the compliance features of Exchange
Those were crazy times getting everybody either migrated with email or onto corporate email - there's a similar explosion of work right now with migration to M365
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#443Earlier 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…
Government? I see that as the SOP for large companies too...
It's possible that once a company reaches a certain size, it's inevitable. Corporations internally have the same top-down centralized organizational structure as a typical government. Market forces can't eliminate that kind of inefficiency if it invariably affects all large enterprises, and the economies of scale enjoyed by such companies outweigh the perverse incentives of sub-organizations.
What strikes me as unique to government is the tendency for sufficiently powerful appendages to secure enough resources to start wagging the dog (e.g. the military industry in the US), although now that I think about it seems possible that it would happen within companies.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#444I happen to run a couple of small servers myself and here's a better version of this approach. Create a cron job that will run a simple self-testing script once every few hours. My self-test does this: 1. Checks that all domains can be accessed via HTTP and HTTPS. If not, DNS might have died. 2. Checks that a few known CMS-generated pages contain some phrases they should contain. If not, SQL might have died. 3. Check…
This would be an awesome apt package that I could configure with a few options and install on any server.
And I would even love to maintain and support it if there was a culture of paid software on Linux. But because the status quo is that everything should be free and "if you publish it, it's your duty to support it", we're stuck reinventing our own wheels.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#445Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the opposite of private property ownership. Property ownership comes at a cost. That cost increases as supply dries up. In this case there is no cost to the individual, only to the group.
> In this case there is no cost to the individual, only to the group. So like all the externalities and their associated costs that capitalism throws at us without a single care...
Capitalism is compatible with Pigouvian taxes.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#447In 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.
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 rational choice under the rules of the game (no communication thus no reliable cooperation). It's no globally optimal, but it is locally for each of them. This take also suffers from the same assumption: that rationality is centered on self-interest only.
If we are to evolve as a species, then we need to get beyond such limited thinking. We need to transcend our base natures. That is the whole point of culture: to transcend as a group what our genes otherwise program us as individuals to do.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#448Proof that the future is here, but just unevenly distributed -- we have technology for dynamic disk expansion, but implementation & integration just isn't present/slick enough to make it available to even tech-inclined hosting consumers just yet.
Guess this is another place of differentiation that some of these platforms could offer.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#4498GB seems like an arbitrary number, especially with no explanation or percentage of total. would be no good on e.g. a 10GB slice
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#450Earlier 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.
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…
You will be surprised, but I saw the same behavior in the large tech company.
Department either uses or loses the budget, so, there was a push to make sure nothing is left.