Category: Geekery

Back in December, the systems administrators at The National Capital Freenet gave me a new disk for the news spool. Since that time, the free disk space has been hovering around 75%, which is kind of ridiculous. So around the middle of ‘Week 16″ in the following graphs, I extended the retention of a bunch of newsgroup hierarchies (mostly the big8, the local ones, and Canadian regional heirarchies) by a couple of days. After waiting a week to see where it stabilized, it made almost no difference – it was now hovering around 70-72% free. Big fucking deal.

So on Week 18 I took a more drastic cut, and added 10-15 days to the retention time of all those groups. It has been scary for the last couple of weeks watching that graph on a steady downward trend, holding my breath hoping it would level out before it hit bottom.

Well, here it is Week 20, and it looks from the graphs that I’ve levelled out at around 50% free. That’s much better. That gives me room to deal with floods, but keeps most groups as long as is practical. Personally, I’ve never seen the point of keeping any groups except *.answers for more than 30 days – you know that if you chime in on a discussion that ended 30 days ago you’re going to be pissing off the majority of people who read it and moved on. And every point that’s made in a discussion that’s been going on for more than 30 days will have been repeated dozens of times in the last 30 days.

Anyway, I find these graphs fascinating. On the Monthly graph you can see this lovely sawtooth as the spool fills up during the day, then quickly goes the other way during the expire run. You can see the wierd little mini-spikes when I made my adjustments and run the news.daily expire run a couple of times in one day to make sure I hadn’t messed anything up, and then you can see the much smaller spikes while the groups whose retention time was increased stopped expiring anything while groups that I didnt’ mess with continued to expire things.

Free Disk-Space for ‘/usr/lib/news/spool/articles’ on theodyn

I like these graphs, and I wouldn’t mind having them for my home system and my linode, but on the other hand what I’ve seen of MRTG looks way too complicated for something as simple as monitoring disk space.

I made another pass through the computer junk today. Two weeks ago I pulled out the stuff that I thought had some potential and tried to sell it on-line. I sold a couple of barebones computers (one of them an AMD Athlon 1800+), a motherboard, a power supply, and a hard drive and a few other miscellaneous bits. I think I made $75 total. Today I took the rest of the junk out (including a Pentium 90 computer and a couple of old Macintoshes, and a SPARCClassic that I never got working) and put it at the end of the driveway for the scavengers to pick through.

The stuff I sold was probably worth a lot more than I sold it for, and there were a few things in the junk pile that would probably sell if I was willing to take the time and hassle to list it on eBay or take it to a swap meet. But hassle is the operative word here – I just wanted to get rid of it, because right now empty shelves are more valuable to me that potential sales.

However, it’s quite amusing to watch the scavengers at work. One of them drove past, slowed way down to have a look, and then sped off. A few minutes later he came back, and parked well away (like nearly 50 metres). He ran over, and furtively and hurriedly grabbed an armload of stuff and ran back to dump it in his trunk. He ran back and grabbed another armload. I swear he looked like a chipmunk collecting nuts, or a person worried that any moment I was going to run out of the house yelling at him for stealing my stuff. If I didn’t want you to take it, I wouldn’t have put it at the end of the driveway!

After he left, our neighbour phoned me to chuckle about his behaviour. Heh.

I’ve got some more stuff to put out later, including some even older Macintosh computers (a WGS-8550 and a LC-III), but I have to wipe the hard drives first. I think I’m going to wait for another time when I can watch out the window.