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.
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.
this is software speciifcally for assembly line management?
There is specific software for everything
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.
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?
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.
oh, thank you
my background is not in engineering which explains my confusing questions
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
You got approval for new SSDs because the manglement recognised threat identified by you as critical?
Right?
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.
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.
And was fired for not doing his job which management prevented him from doing in the first place
Sysadmin pro tip: Keep a 1-10GB file of random data named DELETEME on your data drives. Then if this happens you can get some quick breathing room to fix things.
Also, set up alerts for disk space.
The answer here is not storage it is better alerting.
Why not both? Alerting to find issues quickly, a bit of extra storage so you have more options available in case of an outage, and maybe some redundancy for good measure.
A system this critical is on a SAN, if you’re properly alerting adding a bit more storage space is a 5 minute task.
It should also have a DR solution, yes.
Yes, alert me when disk space is about to run out so I can ask for a massive raise and quit my job when they dont give it to me.
Then when TSHTF they pay me to come back.
The real pro tip is to segregate the core system and anything on your system that eats up disk space into separate partitions, along with alerting, log rotation, etc. And also to not have a single point of failure in general. Hard to say exact what went wrong w/ Toyota but they probably could have planned better for it in a general way.
10GB is nothing in an enterprise datastore housing PBs of data. 10GB is nothing for my 80TB homelab!
It not going to bring the service online, but it will prevent a full disk from letting you do other things. In some cases SSH won’t work with a full disk.
It’s all fun and games until tab autocomplete stops working because of disk space
Tab complete in vim go lolllllooolol NO
It’s nothing for my homework folder.
That’s an incredible collection of homework!
Or make the file a little larger and wait until you’re up for a promotion…
500Gb maybe.
This happens. Recently we had a problem in production where our database grew by a factor of 10 in just a few minutes due to a replication glitch. Of course it took down the whole application as we ran out of space.
Some things just happen and all head room and monitoring cannot save you if things go seriously wrong. You cannot prepare for everything in life and IT I guess. It is part of the job.
Bad things can happen but that’s why you build disaster recovery into the infrastructure. Especially with a compqny as big as Toyota, you can’t have a single point of failure like this. They produce over 13,000 cars per day. This failure cost them close to 300,000,000 dollars just in cars.
The IT people that want to implement that disaster recovery plan do not make the purchasing decisions. It takes an event like this to get the retards in the C-suite listen to IT staff.
In my experience, the C-Suite dicks will put the hammer down on someone and maybe fire a couple of folks. They’ll demand a summary of what happened and what will be done to stop it from happening again. IT will provide legit options to resolve this long term, but because that comes with a price tag they’ll be told to fix it with “process changes” and the cycle continues.
If they give IT money that’s less for themselves at EOY for bonuses so it’s a big concern /s
Yea, fair point regarding the single point of failure. I guess it was one of those scenarios that should just never happen.
I am sure it won’t happen again though.
As I said it can just happen even though you have redundant systems and everything. Sometimes you don’t think about that one unlikely scenario and boom.
There’s some irony to every tech company modeling their pipeline off Toyota’s Kanban system…
Only for Toyota to completely fuck up their tech by running out of disk space for their system to exist on. Looks like someone should have put “Buy more hard drives” to the board.
It was forever ignore in backlog
This is a fun read in the wake of learning about all the personal data car manufacturers have been collecting
Was this that full shutdown everyone thought was going to be malware?
The worst malware of all, unsupervised junior sysadmins.
Human error…lol, classic.
Idiots, they ought to have switched to tabs for indenting. Everybody knows that.
Jokes aside, this got me thinking, is there actual difference in term of file size?
Kanban
Free disk space is just inventory and therefor wasteful.
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Storage has never been cheaper.
There’s going to be a seppuku session in somebody’s IT department.
Someone messed up log rotation and the whole /var went ro.
Free space is a wasted disk space.
Server less DBs ftw
Serverless just means that the user doesn’t manage the capacity by themselves. This scenario can happen easily if the serverless provider is as incompetent as the Toyota admins.
