meow_d

once in a while my brain comes back to this portion of a post on a 2013 renoise forum thread and its incredible gnu linux energy, and i wonder if they are still routing every program on their computer through a daw

i say this cause part of me kinda wants to also try it, what if I too had the ability to apply reverb vsts onto my discord calls? could i handle such power?

same energy

gas
gate
girl
gas

light
keep
boss
light

gate
girl
gas
gate

keep
boss
light
keep

girl
gas
gate
girl

boss
light
keep
boss

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.

Also, another gem to keep in your back pocket in case you need it... Sometimes, when you really run out of disc space, there isn't enough disc space to delete the ballast file (Try not to think about it too hard.):
rm: can not remove Ballast: No space left on device

If this happens, feed it to the disc space bird:
:> Ballast

The disc space bird will eat all the contents of the file, leaving it at 0 bytes, and you with enough disc space to delete things again!

we are not going to do this

but it's pretty cool

especially the disc space bird. that's hilarious

if you're using ext4 or another Linux-first filesystem, you actually have more disk space than the tools tell you about

there's an extra percent or so that is hidden from the free-space reports and can only be accessed by root. stuff running as non-root users is told "can't do that, no free space" before it's actually true.

of course if all your daemons run as root, then the logs or whatever that are filling your disk to the breaking point will also fill the extra space. good distros will run each daemon as its own user because that's the modern way, but you may still run into trouble with your own custom services if you didn't set up a user for them

this means that if you are ever trying to free up disk space and everything is jammed so tight that it can't do that, sometimes you can get it unjammed by doing stuff as root