2.5 Admins 2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache
21 snips
Oct 2, 2025 Exploring the troubles of a full root partition, the hosts dive into the confusion caused by misleading error messages and login failures. They uncover the bandwidth waste caused by TikTok's aggressive video preloading and debate its impact on user experience. ZFS pool issues are front and center, detailing how to handle overlapping segment errors and provide insights on safer data recovery methods. Curious listeners can also learn about new diagnostics added to ZFS and when to prioritize restoring from backups over risky repairs.
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Full Root Causes Misleading Errors
- When a root filesystem fills, errors cascade and report unrelated failures instead of 'disk full'.
- Jim Salter warns that untrapped write failures produce misleading error messages across OSes.
Joe’s Root Partition Horror
- Joe described his own root partition filling and getting a weird error that led him to run df -h and find 100% usage.
- The anecdote illustrates how common and quickly diagnosed this problem can be with basic checks.
Reserve Space For Emergency Access
- Avoid allowing non-admin services to reserve excessive space; if users fill the disk, provide root a reserved percentage for recovery.
- Allan Jude notes reserving space for admin access helps ensure you can still log in to repair the system.
