[885] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Re: project.raeburn
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ckclark@MIT.EDU)
Fri Mar 26 04:17:01 1993
From: ckclark@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 93 04:16:35 EST
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
Cc: raeburn@Athena.MIT.EDU, sipb-afsreq@Athena.MIT.EDU,
"Jonathan I.
Kamens" <jik@GZA.COM>
In-Reply-To: [883]
Reply-To: ckclark@MIT.EDU
It is difficult to point a finger of blame at anyone in particular when
an AFS partition fills up. For one thing, filling the partition does
not necessarily imply exhorbitant use of disk space; if a partition is
close to full, two or three SIPB members catching up on E-Mail after
spring break can easily fill it. Another thing that should be mentioned
is that it is not always obvious when a partition is filled; it's not
like you get a message to the console saying: ``write failed: partition
full" as you would writing to the local disk. In fact, the last time I
filled a partition with a build, I discovered it by looking at the
MAKELOG and seeing that the error that caused it to bail out was a
failed mkdir. The message was ``for future use.'' (This on the
RS/6000, of course---the home of error messages about the ``fopen system
call.'')
Since I frequently do work in the sipb gnu locker, I have to be careful
about filling partitions. I often do several large builds at a time. I
try to free up space by removing build trees for programs I'm not likely
to have to debug, but sometimes it gets close. But I'm not completely
paranoid about it, either; I don't, for example, set aside an xterm to
run ``scout'' in all the time. Maybe I should. But even that could
fail if I'm not sitting there watching it. It would be nice to have a
lightweight program that would monitor the disk space usage and send
zephyrgrams to administrators if a partition gets dangerously close to
filling. Maybe the easiest way to do this would be to add a syslog call
or two to the fileserver source. I, for one, am able to free up a lot
of space quickly on most partitions simply by doing the appropriate
``make clean'' commands, and I would do so if I got a zephyrgram with
a message like "/vipceb on ronald-ann 98% full." Wouldn't you?
