one more cute disaster… it’s hard here in paradise
an old sysadmin once told me "on every drive, write 20gb to a file as ballast to delete in an emergency if you run out of disk" and in my old age, i am passing it on to you
Absolute galaxy brain move. Incredible. I stand in awe. This person was the only true sysadmin, the rest of us were just pretenders to the throne.
An old sysadmin who has kept up with the times, back when they were a young sysadmin it would have been maybe a 200k file rather than one bigger than the entire disk!
yeah it's not adjusted for inflation on prod, so furry sysadmins may have issues
I follow this practice, but a few things to note:
fwiw pretty much all spinning disks have used zoned recording since the mid-00s, the performance is not worse towards the end of the drive anymore
This trick has saved my bacon more than once. Btw you don’t have to be the admin to do this.
even if you're restricted to a user, at the point you're doing this you're administering a system imo
Fair enough. I just thought back over the times this has saved me, and realized that I never had root access.
yeah! i wrote about it because i was reminded by having 6kb left in my home dir thanks to Go and a github install script sudo curl | bash misfiring and installing Several Gigabytes of dependencies for something.
it's good additional context :)
if you get lucky you inherit a system that already has thousands of ballast files because the previous owners didn't believe in log rotation
I think I did this by accident once when I forgot to clean up a large log file I was poking at 😆
I later deleted it when the host was having issues and my manager was like "..."
