Honey I Blew up the Hard Drive

The Network: An Electric Cooperative in the US Midwest with 50+ servers and 100+ workstations

The Expectation: All servers have sufficient free hard disk space available at all times

The Catch: The Application Activity and System Resource Monitoring feature of the Netsurion Windows Sensor was enabled. It notified “Low disk space” on Server37. Less than 2 GB was free.

The Find: An Administrator “oops” moment. As part of a migration task, the same (large) dataset was copied twice, occupying double the expected disk space. Result – unexpected low disk.

The Fix: Delete the duplicate files that were present on the server.

The Lesson: Use a belt and suspenders to assure your pants don’t fall down.