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Comment by jiofj | Hacker News Reader

Didn't they see the balloon?!? https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Pv29dGQwIMI/UFcMD6hgcyI/AAAAAAAAF...

To spell it out, I think the joke here is the assertion that they are probably using old operating system and software. The screenshot is for windows XP.

Why is that a joke? Factory equipment is ordered and has a lifetime of 20 years. Of course it has old systems. These are grownup industries. They have no time for development hipster nonsense and extraction games for unwanted features to stave of unemployment in some glass-towers.

You're shooting the translator.

> They have no time for development hipster nonsense

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-xp-suppo...

> extraction games for unwanted features

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...

> If you continue to use Windows XP now that support has ended, your computer will still work but it might become more vulnerable to security risks and viruses

It only matters if the machine is online, and they often aren't.

> they often aren't.

This was NOT my experience while working in the automotive industry.

> This was NOT my experience while working in the automotive industry.

Exactly. The only people who can climb the corporate ladder are people who care about business "impact" more than anything else.

> It only matters if the machine is online, and they often aren't.

No.

Really, you shouldn't think that. It's really bad security practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

It is typically introduced to the target environment via an infected USB flash drive, thus crossing any air gap.

Funny when you never touched a computer in 20 years and as soon as microsoft posts "Support ended" it suddenly is a problem, when in fact, nothing changed. Computer still send signals and recieves signals just fine.

> Computer still send signals and recieves signals just fine.

Yes, this is in fact the problem which gets exploited and said exploits remain unfixed because it's EOLd.

Mostly works fine until some internal limit is reached. For example, the Y2K bug at the turn of the century. Good thing that was mostly dealt with ok. :)

If that is so, factories should maybe not buy software that has a much shorter lifespan than their 20 years. In essence, they are the ones making the mistake, not the OS vendor. Heck, they should probably fork an existing OS and maintain it themselves if this lifetime requirement is such an important thing.

You're likely not wrong, but also the fact that Windows tells you you're running out of storage going as far back as XP if not further back. I wont be surprised if Mac and Linux do the same. My guess is, they kept ignoring it until it became impossible to ignore. I wonder if years passed until it was unavoidable.

A lot of server OS's/configurations will just silently fill up and take down any services depending on that volume with it.

Well yeah, if your swap partitions on the same as the rest of your OS, eventually it will just make itself known as an issue.

I just had much more fun experience on Debian. The VM simply froze after startup as disk was absolutely full... And figuring out how to actually extend disk through all of the indirection layers took a bit of time.

Never happened to me.. You'll still be able to login, free up some space to get the services up again, and then resize your disk if that's needed.

In this case I had to use rescue mode. As even different tty was too slow to respond.

Also just removing some stuff up wasn't working.

Sounds like swapping/trashing + an exception loop taking all resources

Could it depend on what file system you use, and OS settings you have?

For example, Google says that by default ext4 will reserve 5% of disk space.

So depending on your system, a “100% full” drive might still have a (sometimes significant) bit of space left.

> For example, Google says that by default ext4 will reserve 5% of disk space.

Reserved 5% for root, but if the files/logs that are taking up space are written by the root user then it's a moot point:

> Specify the percentage of the file system blocks reserved for the super-user. This avoids fragmentation, and allows root-owned daemons, such as syslogd(8), to continue to function correctly after non-privileged processes are prevented from writing to the file system. The default percentage is 5%.

* https://man.archlinux.org/man/mke2fs.8

One trick possible with ZFS is to take a pool (e.g., rpool) and create an 'extra' data set in it (rpool/reservation) and set a reservation for it, so that even if all the other areas are filled (rpool/root, rpool/var, rpool/home) you can simply lower the reservation to get some space back quickly.

> if the files/logs that are taking up space are written by the root user then it's a moot point

Yeah. Sorry if my comment was a bit unclear but what I meant to say is that because of this reserved amount I could see it being the case that one machine is still able to finish booting even though the hard drive is “full”, because it is using the reserve capacity to allow processes to write to disk.

Whereas the other person that was unable to boot may have either been using a different file system without reserved amounts, or have settings that made it so reserve was set to 0, or their machine could have been actually physically out of space.

In general both ext3 and ext4.

Most people turn that off coz it is near-useless feature and I don't need OS reserving 5% of 2TB drive

If you use SSH agent, key-based auth will fail and fallback to password, because that requires creating file in /tmp that you can't do if partition with ssh ran out of space.

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