• grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t read the article because documentation is overhead but I’m guessing the real reason is because the guy who kept saying they needed to add more storage was repeatedly told to calm down and stop overreacting.

    • krellor@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I used to do some freelance work years ago and I had a number of customers who operated assembly lines. I specialized in emergency database restoration, and the assembly line folks were my favorite customers. They know how much it costs them for every hour of downtime, and never balked at my rates and minimums.

      The majority of the time the outages were due to failure to follow basic maintenance, and log files eating up storage space was a common culprit.

      So yes, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the problem was something called out by the local IT, but were overruled for one reason or another.

      • Oliver Lowe@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        and log files eating up storage space was a common culprit.

        Another classic symptom of poorly maintained software. Constant announcements of trivial nonsense, like [INFO]: Sum(1, 1) - got result 2! filling up disks.

        I don’t know if the systems you’re talking about are like this, but it wouldn’t surprise me!

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah a few levels.

          Level 1: complex stand alone devices, mostly firmware.

          Level 1a. Stuff slightly more complicated than a list of settings, usually for something like a VFD or a stepper motor controllers. Not as common.

          Level 2 PLCs, HMIs, and the black magic robotic stuff. Stand alone equipment. Like imagine a machine that can take something, heat it up, and give it to the next machine.

          Level 3: DCS and SCADA. Data control center and whatever SCADA stands for, I always forget. This is typically for integrating or at least data collection of multiple stand alone equipment for level 2.

          Level 4: the integration layer between Level 3 and whatever means the company has for entering in sales.

          Like everything in software this is all general. Some places will mix layers, subtract layers, add them. I would complain about the inconsistent nature of it all but without it I would be unemployed.

          • Pat12@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Level 1a. Stuff slightly more complicated than a list of settings, usually for something like a VFD or a stepper motor controllers. Not as common.

            Level 2 PLCs, HMIs, and the black magic robotic stuff. Stand alone equipment. Like imagine a machine that can take something, heat it up, and give it to the next machine.

            Level 3: DCS and SCADA. Data control center and whatever SCADA stands for, I always forget. This is typically for integrating or at least data collection of multiple stand alone equipment for level 2.

            Level 4: the integration layer between Level 3 and whatever means the company has for entering in sales.

            Like everything in software this is all general. Some places will mix layers, subtract layers, add them. I would complain about the inconsistent nature of it all but without it I would be unemployed

            Is this specific software engineering languages? or is this electrical engineering or what kind of work is this?

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I am having problems understanding your questions. I generally operate on level 2 and we typically use graphics based languages when we implement scripting languages to do graphical languages. The two most common graphic languages are FBDs and Ladder-Logic. Both have a general form and vendor specific quirks.

              For scripting I tend towards Perl or Python, but I have seen other guys use different methods.

              Level 3 use pretty much the same tools. Level 4 I have in the passed used a modbus/tcp method but this isn’t something I can really say is typical. One guy I know used the python API to do it.

              • Pat12@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                oh, thank you

                my background is not in engineering which explains my confusing questions

    • DontMakeMoreBabies@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’m this person in my organization. I sent an email up the chain warning folks we were going to eventually run out of space about 2 years ago.

      Guess what just recently happened?

      ShockedPikachuFace.gif

      • vagrantprodigy@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
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        1 year ago

        Literally sent that email this morning. It’s not that we don’t have the space, it’s that I can’t get a maintenance window to migrate the data to the new storage platform.

      • Mike D.@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Can’t you just add a few external USB drives? (heard this more than once at an NGO think tank.)

        • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I mean I’ve worked at a hosting company that had a bunch of static sites running off an SSD connected by usb to the server so this did happen back in the day. I try not to think about those days.

          “What’s that? Your accounting front end that’s built in obsolete front page code on an Access database isn’t working again? It’s probably a file lock, I’ll restart IIS.”

      • IMongoose@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sometimes that person is very silly though. We had a vendor call us saying we needed to clear our logs ASAP!!! due to their size. The log file was no joke, 20 years old. At the current rate, our disk would be full in another 20 years. We cleared it but like, calm down dude.

    • Dojan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ballast!

      Just plonk a large file in the storage, make it relative to however much is normally used in the span of a work week or so. Then when shit hits the fan, delete the ballast and you’ll suddenly have bought a week to “find” and implement a solution. You’ll be hailed as a hero, rather than be the annoying doomer that just bothers people about technical stuff that’s irrelevant to the here and now.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Or you could be fired because technically you’re the one that caused the outage.

      • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Except then they’ll decide you fixed it, so nothing more needs to be done. I’ve seen this happen more than once.