All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by t0mmel on Friday March 26, 2021 @03:13AM (#26589548)

What I don’t understand about this approach is why you think it actually does anything for you ? What you do instead of this is to setup an alert to monitor disk space at the right threshold for you, and then have a contingency plan for how to add more space to your environment.

It seems like you have sort of done that, but in this case you are actually allowing your system to get into a bad state before you react.

Perhaps it’s better to be proactive instead of reactive.

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Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by gitgud on Friday March 26, 2021 @03:18AM (#26589571)

This is true, but alerts and monitoring software can fail in many ways, due to network issues, process crashes... Etc.

Due to the simplicity of this solution, there's not much that can go wrong.... unless you can't actually access the server anymore to delete the file...

I see this more as a second line of defence

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Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by luckylion on Friday March 26, 2021 @03:40AM (#26589649)

If the monitoring fails to alert you, you don't get the alert that you're running out of disk space and you can't access the server to delete the spacer file. All you've done in that case is lower your disk space by 8gb and make your server fill up more quickly.

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Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by Kiro on Friday March 26, 2021 @05:47AM (#26590294)

Setting up alarms sounds complicated. I don't want to deal with that.

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