3 ms·

I once read about old school sysadmins keeping a large dummy file that was a few percent of the total disk size (e.g. 2GB file on a 100GB disk). If a server ran

I once read about old school sysadmins keeping a large dummy file that was a few percent of the total disk size (e.g. 2GB file on a 100GB disk). If a server ran out of disk in the middle of the night due to a bad config, logs filling up, etc., one could delete the file and create some troubleshooting time.

h2odragon 5y ago
"slack file". If you used them as swap they weren't "wasted" but could still be retasked in emergencies. many filesystem have "reserved space" where only root could actually fill the disk: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/7950/reserved-space-for-root-on-a-filesystem-why https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/7950/reserved-space...
frou_dh 5y ago
That's similar to the old gamedev story called "The Programming Antihero" here: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php?print=1 https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tri...