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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

#701

Post by axiolite »

ericbarrett wrote: post #493
axiolite wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you try to use a file system to 99% full --- and it doesn't matter whether it is a 10GB file system or a 10TB file system, you will see significant performance penalties as the file system gets badly fragmented. Not true, I've checked. I have plenty of Linux ext3 servers running for many years that routinely drop down to 1% free space for extended periods before being cleaned-up, which still have essentially zer…

It's true, but it's more true for some file systems than others. When you write a file larger than the contiguous available space after its starting point, a file system must break the file into "extents" (chunks). The less space available, the smaller the extents tend to be, and the more fragmentation you will impose for continued writes. It's just math. Different file systems have wildly different strategies and da…

> It's true

No, still completely untrue.

> When you write a file larger than the contiguous available space after its starting point, a file system must break the file

And why would having a 10TB file system force you to write 100GByte files, whereas a 10GB file system would write 100MByte files instead?

Because that's the topic you're responding to... GP said it doesn't matter whether it is a 10GB file system or a 10TB file system, it "gets badly fragmented" when you get to "99% full".

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

#702

Post by 0_____0 »

chihuahua wrote: post #373
0_____0 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that driving on those last few ounces of fuel is a completely different feeling. Normally you take for granted that the engine works for hours at at time. When you've come to a stop and found those last few ounces of fuel, it's such a relief that the engine can run again, and you know it won't run for very long, but every minute that it continues running saves you many minutes of walking or pushing. You appre…

It's a crazy amount of energy. The 2.5 gallons of gas that that tank holds has more energy than all the food I eat in a month.

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

#703

Post by realaether »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #557
shard wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Any pointers on getting started with the postfix/dovecot method?

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

#704

Post by zerd »

kmonsen wrote: post #489
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…

I remember in Android one year the focus was on slimming down the memory usage. Of course we found an app that shall not be named the allocated a chunk of memory on startup just in case it was going to be needed later.

Reminds me of the speedup loop https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

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

#705

Post by vinay427 »

kaba0 wrote: post #693
jokethrowaway wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA got rich because of unbridled capitalism. Then richness trickled down through generations of companies while regulations caught up and their government became a behemoth not dissimilar to the ones living in EU and that the USA was running from. Nowadays the USA jurisdiction is comparable to the EU one, but they still have more $$$. If you like freedom rankings I recommend these ones: https://www.heritage.org/…

Did that richness really trickle down? Just look at the distribution of that money.

Of course. I agree with what I think you're getting at, specifically that not nearly enough richness trickled down. However, the poorest Americans today are still significantly better off than they were in most any previous decade or century because a bit of that wealth did trickle down.

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

#706

Post by nottorp »

herpderperator wrote: post #541
nottorp wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

sshd runs as root, so yes, it will be possible to login as any user -- the sshd daemon will be able to function. :-) The only files that would be appended to on user login (by sshd, which is running as root) would be /var/log/{utmp,wtmp,btmp} to record the login (in practice I've only seen wtmp). After that you have sshd logging (e.g. /var/log/{messages,syslog,auth.log}) which is picked up by syslog-ng or its equival…

Logging in as the user loads the user's shell, shell config files etc. As that user. Only then you can go to being root... if you can.

As for keys, they're fine if you only ever use the same machine. Which may not happen in an emergency.

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

#707

Post by bradknowles »

vagrantJin wrote: post #607
herbcso wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your frustration may come from a good place, believing gov and big orgs want to be efficient. They don't and they don't have to. They are super efficient when it comes to taxes though. At least in my country, every department is trash except the revenue service which is so forward thinking and effective, they put private business to shame.

Not here in the US. The IRS has been crippled by previous Republican administrations to the point of uselessness, as another method of giving free unlimited tax breaks to the millionaires and billionaires that bought them in office.

But god help the poor people who file simple tax returns that can be easily audited, however.

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

#708

Post by jcims »

myself248 wrote: post #235
Saris wrote: post #207

It's interesting to me that linux doesn't natively reserve a little space to allow basic commands like directory listing and file deletion to function even with a full disk. Because really the biggest problem when I've had a partition get full, is I sometimes can't even delete the offending log file.

It still boggles my mind that the act of deleting a file can fail because it requires space to perform the act. If y'ask me, that's a fundamental design flaw. Of course nobody asked me...

No real good way to send messages on HN, i recalled a convo we had a while back about phone switches and thought you might enjoy this YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngRb6mBB9HY

Tons of recordings from back in the day.

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

#709

Post by anitil »

pydave wrote: post #417
ABeeSea wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I just spent 20 minutes trying to find an article by Bryne Hobart vaguely in this area [0], but for personal messaging. The idea being if you control the storage (or deletion) you can avoid casual or speculative regulatory interest in your chat logs.

(apologies it's on medium, I couldn't find it anywhere else)

[0] https://byrnehobart.medium.com/the-stealth-regulatory-arbitr...

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

#710

Post by anitil »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #569
MereInterest wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember Matt Levine talking about how regulators would often find emails along the line of "Let's sell this crap to those idiots" and use that as leverage to force settlements rather than showing actual violation of regulations.

The reason being that it's hard to show intent to defraud, and much easier to threaten bad press.

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