I don't think I've ever paid attention to a MotD on any of the servers I had a ssh access to... what do people put there?
> what do people put there?
\033[1;31mCLEAN YOUR FUCKING DRIVE OR I'LL DO IT FOR YOU!\033[0m
Quotas mean "more than this is clearly too much" not "please use this space".
In good times nobody minds, but in bad times when you just can't extend the drive you have to tell people off. Part of the job of making sure the system can continue to work for what you need it, under _real_ constraints.
You may have to delete stuff, you may have to shut the server down to save power. You may have to limit clock speeds. It depends on the environment and "it really should work because it should be covered by next day on site warranty and you could download more ram" often doesn't apply.
super tangential, but makes me think I never realised that "quota" can either be a lower or an upper bound depending on context
Apps had a (recommended and then user-configurable) "Minimum memory" and "Preferred memory." The app would not launch if the OS couldn't give it the minimum. It would then give the app up to the preferred amount, if available, exclusively... This was in the era before virtual memory and paging, so there was no easy way to share memory across an application boundary.
This mean that savvy users with high-resource tasks knew you had to launch your apps in a certain order to get the architecture into the configuration to do their work.
Ah, memories of Uni, back when storage was fairly expensive, where we had both hard and soft quotas. The soft quota would allow for temporary growth of build artefacts and things¹ but you would get stern emails if you were over your soft quota for 24 hours, and if you persisted without good reason³ your hard quota would be reduced so you effectively have no soft quota any more.
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[1] some machines had no local storage that the user could touch so putting them there was not always possible, some people on Windows machines had local storage but didn't have the relevant tools locally so were actually running things on the shared server(s)² instead of that just being a storage resource
[2] via telnet/rsh/rlogin: yes, I am that old… SSH was a thing by that point, though OpenSSH wasn't, and I was using it where available, but the use of older plain-text protocols was still far far more common
[3] it wasn't actually difficult to justify a quota extension for project work, in fact people enrolled on certain modules got higher quotas automatically
Don't worry, disk got expensive again. Disks are usually at least 2X more expensive than a year ago currently. Sometimes 3X more.
HDD prices are a bit more reasonable. Mostly because they are so heavy. Still insane to where prices were just 12 months ago
Probably why both soft and hard limits were developed.
In my ecosystem, developers don't have time to glad-hand like this; if there are issues with DEV_NODE_CFG_1_29875, we might talk about it over Slack (because I'm the first one to know there's a problem as the end-user), and if we can't sort it out they'll give me some time to backup, blank the whole machine, and I get a brand-new image of DEV_NODE_CFG_1_29875.
I can't even tell you off the top of my head what territory the physical machine is running in or whether it's the only dev-node on that hardware.
(Broadly speaking, I think Microsoft is assuming cattle ecosystems; they're not openly-hostile to pets per se, but they have a strict ranking of the priorities because the "cattle ranches," as it were, bring in more money).
> but that's probably not a universal stance.
Another frequent problem we had was people using the systems while others were. They wouldn't check the machine's status. And of course you can guess that I wasn't allowed to add a scheduler.
A lot of groups do things in janky ways. Often not because they don't know any better but because leadership doesn't and is assertive
There will be a system outage 2026-11-11 (08:00 ET) to 2026-11-13, Wed to Fri.
"I have not touched any machines in fra3 for a week, how the hell would I know of it? Why do we even have #fra3-maintenance and #maintenance channels then, if that's your stance?"
We put the MOTD up ≥7 days in advance and put it in relevant Slack channels.
We still get "Is Foo down?" the day of.
It sounds like a lot, but it's fairly compact and really helps when you need to absolutely sure where you are and you have eight terminal windows open.
Like, I used to, but it was in the early 1990s.. People look at them now?
Next I'll be asking people to finger me to get my availability ..
Can still do it these days of course, but one with a seriously copious helping of ssh in the mix too ..
Trouble is, nobody else can do it. The only reason I have to use {social-media-blob} is because my friends don't know how to finger.