THANK YOU. How are so many people in this thread content with saying “monitoring isn’t perfect, this solution is ingenious”. Ofc nothing is perfect and even when you do everything right things can still go wrong, but if you don’t have a ROBUST monitoring/alert system in place then you’re not even doing the bare minimum. They’re acting like it’s rocket science to set thresholds, and have meaningful alerts and checks in place. Not to mention if you wait until disk full you risk issues like block corruption among others and your 8GB of space doesn’t do anything. It’s why people in this industry are on call, it’s why they have monitoring on their monitoring systems. The bare minimum
Yeah it’s crazy. If someone does this on their homelab server it’s probably fine but if they run it in production I really want to know because Im not buying jack from them.
Of course! But do you put all your trust in your monitoring, 100%? You've never had monitoring fail for any reason at all? You've never had a server fill up before you can respond to the alert?
This 8gb file idea isn't to replace monitoring. It's to offer a quick stopgap solution so you can do things in a hurry and give yourself a little extra "out" when things go awry. Because believe me, they WILL go awry. And if you're not prepared for that eventuality, then I don't know what else to say.
> But do you put all your trust in your monitoring, 100%?
Yes. If I didn't feel that I can trust it, I would get another solution.
> You've never had a server fill up before you can respond to the alert?
I have. With the proposed hack in this article: it would fill up even faster: by that amount of time it would take the problem to write 8gb of data.
> Because believe me, they WILL go awry.
In my experience: not in any way that this would help. If your disk fills up, it's either slow (and your monitoring alerts you days or at least hours before it's a problem) or it's really, really fast. In the latter case, it's much faster than you can jump on your computer, ssh into the machine and delete your spacer file.
Invest in better monitoring, that's much, much, much, much better than adding spacer files to fill up your disk or changing the wall clock to give you more time.
Ah I see where you are coming from. You see the spacer as a way to prevent a problem that should be prevented by better monitoring. But that's not what it is for. It's for quickly providing a stopgap so that you have time to solve the root cause without enduring more downtime.
If you've had a disk go full on you, what's the first thing you do? For me, I log in and start looking for a log file to truncate to buy me a few megs of space, at least. This spacer file is just a guaranteed way to find the space you need without having to hunt for it.
Also it doesn't HAVE to be 8GB. On most systems I think a 500mb file would be every bit as effective.
