Not That Better

It seems that my decision to atop btrfs for better container management has come back to bite me.

The container part works perfectly (I can clone containers with copy-on-write and filesystem compression, which is great), but btrfs has a rather quaint notion of “free” space and was reporting the filesystem as full even though I could “see” half a gigabyte free – roughly 20% in this case, since I have separate disk images for the host OS, site data and containers1.

So I spent a few hours cloning the relevant disks, assembling a clone Linode instance and migrating all the storage to ext4, with a few updates to boot. Everything’s now on 14.04.1 LTS (which ships with Docker), so I’ll be having a little bit of fun later on. I’m not using Docker here yet since this has been running fine for years on standard LXC system containers, and as much as I like the new trend of lightweight containers, I also like to maintain stable solutions…

Speaking of stable (and reliable), Linode’s management tools (as well as their rescue image and remote console) are still awesome, and even though I’ve mostly been tinkering with Azure and DigitalOcean lately, it’s nice to know they’re still up to par.


  1. I have separate containers for a SPDY/caching front-end, the application server and a couple of other independent apps, including a jail for the daemon. ↩︎

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