I haven’t read the article because documentation is overhead but I’m guessing the real reason is because the guy who kept saying they needed to add more storage was repeatedly told to calm down and stop overreacting.
I used to do some freelance work years ago and I had a number of customers who operated assembly lines. I specialized in emergency database restoration, and the assembly line folks were my favorite customers. They know how much it costs them for every hour of downtime, and never balked at my rates and minimums.
The majority of the time the outages were due to failure to follow basic maintenance, and log files eating up storage space was a common culprit.
So yes, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the problem was something called out by the local IT, but were overruled for one reason or another.
and log files eating up storage space was a common culprit.
Another classic symptom of poorly maintained software. Constant announcements of trivial nonsense, like
[INFO]: Sum(1, 1) - got result 2!filling up disks.I don’t know if the systems you’re talking about are like this, but it wouldn’t surprise me!
You gotta forward that to Spunk so your logs ain’t filling up the server generating them. Plus you can set up automated alerts for when the result stops being 2.
This message brought to you by Big Splunk.
And yet that’s probably there because sometime, somewhere, it returned 1.9 or 2.00001 or some such nonsense.
1 + 1 = 2.000001 for sufficiently large (but not by much) values of 1.
this is software speciifcally for assembly line management?
There is specific software for everything
Yeah a few levels.
Level 1: complex stand alone devices, mostly firmware.
Level 1a. Stuff slightly more complicated than a list of settings, usually for something like a VFD or a stepper motor controllers. Not as common.
Level 2 PLCs, HMIs, and the black magic robotic stuff. Stand alone equipment. Like imagine a machine that can take something, heat it up, and give it to the next machine.
Level 3: DCS and SCADA. Data control center and whatever SCADA stands for, I always forget. This is typically for integrating or at least data collection of multiple stand alone equipment for level 2.
Level 4: the integration layer between Level 3 and whatever means the company has for entering in sales.
Like everything in software this is all general. Some places will mix layers, subtract layers, add them. I would complain about the inconsistent nature of it all but without it I would be unemployed.
Level 1a. Stuff slightly more complicated than a list of settings, usually for something like a VFD or a stepper motor controllers. Not as common.
Level 2 PLCs, HMIs, and the black magic robotic stuff. Stand alone equipment. Like imagine a machine that can take something, heat it up, and give it to the next machine.
Level 3: DCS and SCADA. Data control center and whatever SCADA stands for, I always forget. This is typically for integrating or at least data collection of multiple stand alone equipment for level 2.
Level 4: the integration layer between Level 3 and whatever means the company has for entering in sales.
Like everything in software this is all general. Some places will mix layers, subtract layers, add them. I would complain about the inconsistent nature of it all but without it I would be unemployed
Is this specific software engineering languages? or is this electrical engineering or what kind of work is this?
I am having problems understanding your questions. I generally operate on level 2 and we typically use graphics based languages when we implement scripting languages to do graphical languages. The two most common graphic languages are FBDs and Ladder-Logic. Both have a general form and vendor specific quirks.
For scripting I tend towards Perl or Python, but I have seen other guys use different methods.
Level 3 use pretty much the same tools. Level 4 I have in the passed used a modbus/tcp method but this isn’t something I can really say is typical. One guy I know used the python API to do it.
oh, thank you
my background is not in engineering which explains my confusing questions
I’m this person in my organization. I sent an email up the chain warning folks we were going to eventually run out of space about 2 years ago.
Guess what just recently happened?
ShockedPikachuFace.gif
You got approval for new SSDs because the manglement recognised threat identified by you as critical?
Right?
Sometimes that person is very silly though. We had a vendor call us saying we needed to clear our logs ASAP!!! due to their size. The log file was no joke, 20 years old. At the current rate, our disk would be full in another 20 years. We cleared it but like, calm down dude.
Can’t you just add a few external USB drives? (heard this more than once at an NGO think tank.)
I mean I’ve worked at a hosting company that had a bunch of static sites running off an SSD connected by usb to the server so this did happen back in the day. I try not to think about those days.
“What’s that? Your accounting front end that’s built in obsolete front page code on an Access database isn’t working again? It’s probably a file lock, I’ll restart IIS.”
Ballast!
Just plonk a large file in the storage, make it relative to however much is normally used in the span of a work week or so. Then when shit hits the fan, delete the ballast and you’ll suddenly have bought a week to “find” and implement a solution. You’ll be hailed as a hero, rather than be the annoying doomer that just bothers people about technical stuff that’s irrelevant to the here and now.
Or you could be fired because technically you’re the one that caused the outage.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!
Except then they’ll decide you fixed it, so nothing more needs to be done. I’ve seen this happen more than once.
And was fired for not doing his job which management prevented him from doing in the first place
Sysadmin pro tip: Keep a 1-10GB file of random data named DELETEME on your data drives. Then if this happens you can get some quick breathing room to fix things.
Also, set up alerts for disk space.
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Why not both? Alerting to find issues quickly, a bit of extra storage so you have more options available in case of an outage, and maybe some redundancy for good measure.
A system this critical is on a SAN, if you’re properly alerting adding a bit more storage space is a 5 minute task.
It should also have a DR solution, yes.
There’s cases where disk fills up quicker than one can reasonably react, even if alerts are in place. And sometimes culprit is something you can’t just go and kill.
And sometimes culprit is something you can’t just go and kill.
That’s what the Yakuza is for.
Had an issue like that a few years back. A stand alone device that was filling up quickly. The poorly designed device could only be flushed via USB sticks. I told them that they had to do it weekly. Guess what they didn’t do. Looking back I should have made it alarm and flash once a week on a timer.
A lot of companies have minimal alerting or no alerting at all. It’s kind of wild. I literally have better alerting in my home setup than many companies do lol
Even better, cron job every 5 mins and if total remaining space falls to 5% auto delete the file and send a message to sys admin
Sends a message and gets the services ready for potential shutdown. Or implements a rate limit to keep the service available but degraded.
At that point just set the limit a few gig higher and don’t have the decoy file at all
The real pro tip is to segregate the core system and anything on your system that eats up disk space into separate partitions, along with alerting, log rotation, etc. And also to not have a single point of failure in general. Hard to say exact what went wrong w/ Toyota but they probably could have planned better for it in a general way.
10GB is nothing in an enterprise datastore housing PBs of data. 10GB is nothing for my 80TB homelab!
It not going to bring the service online, but it will prevent a full disk from letting you do other things. In some cases SSH won’t work with a full disk.
It’s all fun and games until tab autocomplete stops working because of disk space
Tab complete in vim go lolllllooolol NO
It’s nothing for my homework folder.
Or make the file a little larger and wait until you’re up for a promotion…
500Gb maybe.
There’s some irony to every tech company modeling their pipeline off Toyota’s Kanban system…
Only for Toyota to completely fuck up their tech by running out of disk space for their system to exist on. Looks like someone should have put “Buy more hard drives” to the board.
It was forever ignore in backlog
Idiots, they ought to have switched to tabs for indenting. Everybody knows that.
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Jokes aside, this got me thinking, is there actual difference in term of file size?
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I blame lean philosophy. Keeping spare parts and redundancy is expensive so definitely don’t do it…which is just rolling the dice until it comes up snake eyes and your plant shuts down.
It’s the “save 5% yearly and stop trying to avoid a daily 5% chance of disaster”
Over prepared is silly, but so is under prepared.
They were under prepared.
I work in a manufacturing company that was owned by the founder for 50 years until about 4 years ago when he retired. He disagreed with a lot of the ideas behind lean manufacturing so we had like 5 years worth of inventory sitting in our warehouse.
When the new management came in, there was a lot of squawking about inefficiency, how wasteful it was to keep so much raw material on the shelf, and how we absolutely needed to sell it off or get rid of it.
Then a funny little thing happened in 2020.
Suddenly, we were the only company in our industry still churning out product. Other companies were calling us, desperate to buy our products or even just our raw material. We saw MASSIVE growth the next two years and came out of the pandemic better than ever. And it was mostly thanks to the old owners view that “Just In Time” manufacturing was BS.
Cool story, but a once every 150 years pandemic is hardly a good reason to keep wasting money on storing stuff. A fire or a flood was much more likely to wipe it all out in 50 years.
Even in your anecdote the owner never actually benefited from the extra costs.
Depending on what you’re producing costs to maintain extra inventory of raw materials can be massive and for the company the size of Toyota, multiply that by million.
You’re not wrong, but the real answer is somewhere in between.
Even in your anecdote the owner never actually benefited from the extra costs.
Imagine doing something or having a life/business philosophy that doesn’t exist for your own soul benefit, and exists maybe for the benefit of others.
Oh man. I work for an OEM and have almost the same story except the CEO didn’t retire so our shelves were never bare. A large part of our sales last year was because our competition couldn’t source parts and we could. Also since they have a skeleton engineering crew they couldn’t figure out how to improvise (at least this is what our salespeople are claiming).
2022 I spent 3 hours a day, every single working day, just making ECNs for parts out of stock.
Lean JIT is such fucking crap. When a customer line goes down they are bleeding who knows how many millions a day. They want a solution right freaken now. So they call the OEM and we tell them that part that died we have right here on the shelf and we can overnight it.
But you know how you really know that JIT Evengelical types are full of it? Talk to any of them now and they won’t say something like “look, normally it works but no one could have predicted this” they will double down on it and say it works but was implement incorrectly. It isnt “true” JIT.
Many years ago I read a sentence that I use every single week of my life “all ideology can do is reassert itself endlessly”. When I hear crap like that, how X works if and only if it is true-X I know I am dealing with ideology. When I hear that X works under very specific situations and only gives specific results I know I am dealing with facts. Yes if the customer is never in a rush, there isn’t a world shaking event, and you are running out of capacity for storage JIT might be an answer.
Free disk space is just inventory and therefor wasteful.
This is a fun read in the wake of learning about all the personal data car manufacturers have been collecting
Kanban
Just delete some p0rn
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C:\Homework\System Files\Win32\Windows files\Do not Open\Virus\Please don’t open
Mine right now is
…/250-pineapple-photos/golf/stop/okay its porn/
Seems convoluted, I just call mine “Porn”
Who’s ever gonna look in there?
I mean, there really are 250 high quality pineapple photos in there!
I suppose “golf” is out of place, but… Stay out, would ya!!"
View --> Advanced --> Show Hidden Files and Folders
Search: “*.mp4 OR *.mkv OR *.avi OR *.rm”
Was this that full shutdown everyone thought was going to be malware?
The worst malware of all, unsupervised junior sysadmins.
Human error…lol, classic.
Storage has never been cheaper.
There’s going to be a seppuku session in somebody’s IT department.
well well, someone will be fired
Someone messed up log rotation and the whole /var went ro.
Search for non system files older than 2020 and lmza zip archive that shit stat!
You have now archived the encryption keys. Nothing can communicate and everything begins failing.
Ctrl+z?
Free space is a wasted disk space.
They paid for the whole disk, they’re going to use the whole disk.
