The shelves may be empty, but the disk is full: Not even Linux can resist the bork at times
- Reference: 1585041467
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/24/bork_walmart/
- Source link:
Snapped by Register reader Ralph Grabowski, in an Abbotsford Walmart, the afflicted Samsung screen can normally be found encouraging shoppers to buy more stuff.
Now it is simply bereft space. Crammed to capacity, the disk is likely groaning under the weight of... stuff. Unlike some shelves at certain retailers where once essentials such as toilet paper and cleaning products enjoyed pride of place.
LILO, the Linux loader visible on screen, was to be found in many distros back in the day and lingers on even as the likes of GRUB have supplanted it. Similarly the INIT line: that version 2.78 speaks of gentler times, back when this particular bit of kit was put together.
Sadly, the boot process is now festooned with storage errors before stalling at runlevel 3. We're guessing this is something along the lines of multi-user mode with a bit of networking, but have no doubt that someone will be along soon enough to correct us.
"Using Linux," Grabowski observed dryly, "is probably how Walmart saves shoppers money."
A good thing too. The [1]company's financials for the last quarter (PDF) saw a small drop in net sales for Canada, although profits and income were up. Its UK tentacle did not fare so well. Clearly needs more Linux.
Walmart [2]modestly declares itself as one of Canada's top 10 most influential brands – [3]ahead of Visa but some way behind YouTube – and its more than 400 stores serve over 1.2 million happy Canucks.
Sadly, it appears that among more than 85,000 "associates", it has yet to find one that understands Linux.
Just like much of the rest of the world. ®
[1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/056532643/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/Earnings-Presentation-1.31.2020-Updated.pdf
[2] https://www.walmartcanada.ca/our-story
[3] https://strategyonline.ca/2020/02/04/canadas-most-influential-brands-tims-out-samsung-back-in/
Re: This can't be Linux
One could reasonably say that Linux hasn’t broken - it’s got the user to a point where they can fix the issue they’ve got.
Been a *very* long time since I’ve done any windows admin work, but I don’t recall it being so useful if you filled the disk and rebooted.
Re: This can't be Linux
"Been a *very* long time since I’ve done any windows admin work, but I don’t recall it being so useful if you filled the disk and rebooted."
I did exactly that recently and actually Windows booted, limped very badly and let me address the issue. Win10 seems reasonably OK with it.
Re: This can't be Linux
Regarding WIndows 10 with a full disk, biggest issue is normally a user profile has to exist or you can't login (Because it will fail to create a new folder and files, then attempt to use a TEMP profile and then fail again), if you login to an existing profile it may not load the profile properly but on the 3 occassions I have come across this was enough to clear some space.
Re: This can't be Linux
It’s been some years since I’ve seen a windows blue screen or a Linux kernel panic thing on a personal computer.
I have seen them both on servers as recently as last year though,
Re: This can't be Linux
I can tell you, from first hand personal experience, that NT 4 was unable to boot with a boot disk full. Killed himself when trying to add info to its event log. That was a lot of time ago, but created a critical incident that lasted a whole day.
Perhaps they have become better with later versions... haven't had to support anything for a while, you see.
It'll Take Years to Fill Up a Disk
The "Somebody else's problem" approach to system development...
R/O FS
When do you want to use read/only filesystems? There, where your system is embedded. You do not log or write braindead (just filling the filesystem) but build an infrastructure. So many things you need to think about and take care of. But that would require experience, which does not come cheap. And that goes for any operating system.
Who has tried a RPi with a writable SD card? It survives about 3 months before the flash wears out. Ah well,...
Re: R/O FS
/tmp on a ramdisk! /etc/fstab line:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs noatime,nosuid,size=20%,mode=1777 0 0
Re: R/O FS
I bought I Pi from RS and another from Farnell on the day of release. One is still running on its original SD card. The other died from a failing power supply and took its SD card with it. I have had one Pi get into trouble from defective USB flash. I switched it to SATA flash and it has lasted years. If your SD cards are dying you are buying defective flash.
Re: R/O FS
It all depends on what you use them for. Out of my dozen Pis, the ones writing on average less than 10MB a day are on their original cards. The ones writing 500MB or more a day would go through a class 4/6 SD card in about a year. Those are now either attached to SSDs (yet to fail) or USB 3 memory sticks (1 failure after 4 years).
Interpretation
Run level 3 means that all networking and "user space" processes (web server, time daemon, login daemon etc) have started, but X Windows has not. A user can now log in at the terminal or via SSH (or probably TCP, given the obvious age).
At a guess the failed processes are part of a log writer, so probably /var is full, since that is where the logs go. It depends on the distribution, but probably /var is just part of the root file system. There should be a log rotation and expiry job run by cron once a day which deletes anything older than a week. At a guess, this hasn't been running.
This can't be Linux
This is probably the Linux subsystem on a Windows 10 installation. Because Linux never breaks. Never ever ever. Heresy!