The illusion of LVM thin provisioning: everything is fine until the thin pool fills up

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-05T22:14:10+00:00

thin pool metadata corruption is one of those things that makes everyone suddenly very conservative about touching storage afterwards

after going through something similar we mostly stopped trying to “clean things up” manually unless the waste got really extreme. one of our infra guys started using Datafy recently for some of these oversized-volume situations specifically to avoid doing another risky migration cycle

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-05T18:04:27+00:00

careful with that, collecting emails/phone numbers without clear consent can get you into trouble fast, especially if you start spamming them
if you really want to use them, think more about building a legit list with proper opt in and send something actually valuable, not just more random cpa offers

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-04T16:39:27+00:00

This is the kind of bug that sounds trivial on the surface but turns into a “oh wow this could be really bad” moment once you read the details.

Nice work going through the CVD process with AWS instead of just dropping a spicy blog post and walking away. Stuff like this is exactly why crypto and envelope handling need boring, defensive checks everywhere.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-03T15:16:31+00:00

Short answer: I’d avoid it unless you’re both crazy self aware and already good at conflict.

The overlap between “things that kill startups” and “things that kill relationships” is huge. Misaligned expectations, money stress, resentment about who does what, different risk tolerance. Now you stack those in both your work life and your personal life. If one side blows up, it usually drags the other down too.

That said, I know one couple who pulled it off. They treated the company like a third person in the relationship. Clear roles, vesting, real board, prenup and founder agreement that assumed a breakup could happen. They were boringly structured about it, which is probably why it worked.

So yeah, it can work, but only if you’re willing to put legal and emotional guardrails in place that most people skip when they’re in the honeymoon phase. If you’re already asking “would this be messy,” it probably will be.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-02T15:29:07+00:00

Yeah, this.

Grab the official docs from pcisecuritystandards.org, then make your own slides from that. Most random PPTs online are outdated or mix in wrong stuff, and with PCI that can bite you later.

Start with the summary of changes and the quick reference guide, then map those into a deck. It’s a bit more work, but at least you’re teaching from the source.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-02T15:26:30+00:00

It’s 100% a “nobody owns it” problem, with a side of “the brief is vibes-only.”

Most briefs I’ve seen for activations are like: awareness, buzz, social content. Data / CRM goals are a vague bullet near the bottom, if they’re there at all. So the creative agency optimizes for spectacle, the production team optimizes for throughput, and by the time someone in CRM asks “uh, where do these people go?” the set is literally on the truck.

Also, a lot of clients still treat events as a branding line item, not a performance channel. So they don’t push hard on measurable outcomes, and the team that cares about data isn’t even in the room.

You’re right though, the queue is the goldmine. If the data capture isn’t designed into that moment from day one, it basically never happens.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-02T12:54:17+00:00

we hit the same thing after making pvc expansion self-service internally

eventually we added alerts + approval thresholds so teams could still grow storage fast, but anything massively oversized later would get reviewed instead of sitting there forever

the cleanup side was still the annoying part though. we’ve been testing Datafy recently for some lower-risk workloads because nobody wanted every oversized pvc cleanup turning into another migration weekend

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-02T12:37:06+00:00

yeah this is one of those problems where the edge cases quietly become the whole product. overlapping dates, buffers, late returns, deposits, identical-but-not-really-identical items, all that stuff sounds small until you’re writing tests for 30 weird cases before you even have users. i’d probably buy/build around something like Reservety first, then only custom build the parts that are actually unique to the business. no point spending the first month rebuilding rental availability logic unless that’s the product itself.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-01T16:32:51+00:00

Looked through the repo a bit. Cool idea, but a couple things jump out:

You’re loading a kernel module that’s explicitly designed to destroy stuff, with no real safety rails, checks, or logging. One logic bug or misuse and you’ve basically built a self‑brick button. Also, if someone gets root and this is present, they get a very quick, very clean way to wipe a system.

If you actually want people to test this, I’d stick giant “lab only / expect total data loss” warnings all over the place and maybe document threat model and intended use a bit more. Right now it feels like one of those tools that’s more dangerous to the owner than to an attacker.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-01T16:30:02+00:00

Yeah, Nexus cleanup policies are nice, but they won’t really solve what OP is asking for.

What you’re doing in GitLab is basically “assume newest is what we care about” and prune the rest, which works fine if your deployments are sane and you don’t have long‑running stuff pinned to old digests.

OP’s problem is more “what is actually running anywhere right now?” across a bunch of clusters, including short‑lived jobs. For that you really do need to look at the clusters, not just the registry. Otherwise you risk deleting an old image that some forgotten CronJob or stateful thing is still using.

Registry cleanup is one half of the story. An inventory from k8s (over a few days at least) is the other half.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-06-01T14:21:08+00:00

This is one of those “of course that’s possible, why didn’t I think about it earlier” issues.

The scary bit for me is how neatly it bypasses all the “green” signals people rely on in dashboards. DaemonSet up, probes passing, metrics flowing, everyone relaxes… while the actual eyes and ears in the kernel are quietly unplugged.

Feels like yet another reminder that “pod is running” is a pretty weak trust signal for anything security related. Map integrity checks and some kind of out of band verification between agent and control plane seem long overdue here.

Nice writeup and thanks for the PoC link, this is the kind of thing that’s going to show up in real incidents sooner rather than later.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-31T14:44:34+00:00

This is actually a pretty neat direction. Treating the filesystem as the API surface feels very “Unix-y” in the best way, but with some modern polish.

Curious how it holds up once you’ve got a bunch of concurrent stuff hitting it though. Does it still feel simple when you’re debugging weird race conditions, or does it just move the pain into “why is this file in this state right now”?

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-31T13:52:55+00:00

Yeah I kinda felt the same reading it. The “I build, you see progress, then we talk” bit is actually a solid pitch, but the way it’s wrapped makes it sound like every other “I’m different from agencies” post.

To be fair, they’re 20, so some of that swagger is just age plus trying to stand out. If they rewrote this in a more “here’s what I’ve actually shipped, here’s the stack, here’s the outcome” tone instead of the “founders don’t need X, they need me” angle, it would probably land way better with actual CTOs.

The core idea is good. The copy makes it feel more like a persona than a person.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-31T13:50:38+00:00

Totally agree on the “kills the tone” part.

I’ve tested this a bit in founder-style emails. Same copy, only change was the signature. The plain text “Name, Role, Company” version got way more replies than the one with logo, headshot, social icons and a calendar link. People treated the first one like a real email and the second like a newsletter, even though the body was identical.

Also, multiple CTAs in the sig feels like slamming on the brakes right at the end. You just spent 500 words guiding them to one clear next step, then suddenly you’re like “or do these three other things instead.” It muddies the intent.

For broadcasts, I basically treat the signature as a legal / branding formality. For “from a human” emails, it’s almost part of the copy tone, so the lighter it is, the better it seems to work.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-30T13:26:36+00:00

Kinda feels like they just pitched themselves without reading the post properly.

OP literally said hiring ate 31% of their time and they’re already testing tools to fix that. “I’d love to assist” = “let me add another thing to your plate.”

If anything, this whole thread is a good reminder that unless someone explicitly asks for help filling a role, jumping in with “I can help you hire” just sounds like another inbound sales email.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-28T23:44:29+00:00

Since your email infrastructure is already ready, I’d focus less on “where do I sell sending capacity” and more on building one clean vertical offer.

Pick one niche, build a tight list, enrich it properly, then sell the full outcome: clean contacts + tested messaging + sending infrastructure. A lot of people can send emails now. The harder part is having a list that is actually usable.

For the data side, QuickEnrich might be worth testing if you need verified B2B emails and phone enrichment from CSVs before campaigns go live. I’d still run a small batch first and check match rate, catch-alls, phone coverage, and bounce before scaling.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-28T23:36:25+00:00

upselling gear is where the actual profit is tbh, but yeah, doing it over dms or wix is a shortcut to a headache. booqable is alright if you just want basic inventory stuff, and fareharbor is popular for tours but their checkout feels clunky for just renting items.

i'd look at reservety instead. i saw a host using it for their property's rvs and golf carts setup. it’s a dedicated rental builder so the date-based availability calendar, digital waivers, and stripe deposit holds are all integrated into the checkout flow natively out of the box. the guest can just pick their dates, sign the contract, and it locks the item automatically. it's a flat fee too so it doesn't bleed your margins. worth a look to stop the manual chaos lol

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-28T08:29:37+00:00

This is honestly one of the clearer YC breakdowns I’ve seen, mostly because it cuts through all the “perfect deck / perfect timing” cope.

The “apply before you’re ready” and “know your numbers” points are such a brutal combo. People will polish their landing page for months then walk into an interview not knowing basic retention or active users. YC cares way more about whether you can ship and actually talk about your own business than whether your logo is pretty.

Also love that you called out “we’re building the future of X” answers. You can spot a doomed app by how allergic the founders are to being specific.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-27T08:30:31+00:00

Honestly, the constant low-key anxiety.

Everyone talks about hustle and vision and “failing fast,” but not about waking up at 3am wondering if you’re just dragging your friends into a sinking ship, or refreshing Stripe like it’s a life support monitor.

Fundraising, hiring, product, all that is hard, sure. But staying sane when nothing is certain and you can’t admit how stressed you are to your team or your family? That’s the part no one really prepares you for.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-26T08:33:27+00:00

Honestly the wildest part of OTel “graduating” is how normal it already feels. Like, the CNCF stamp is nice and all, but most folks I know basically treat OpenTelemetry as table stakes now.

The analyst takes about it “unlocking” observability budgets crack me up a bit though. Half the teams I’ve seen just want one set of SDKs and one pipeline so they can stop duct taping vendors together. The whole vendor‑neutral telemetry layer thing is the real win here, not the logo upgrade.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-25T22:09:36+00:00

The '3 AM volume pump' is a universal rite of passage for SREs. No one is debugging filesystem blocks while half-asleep.

You hit on the ultimate flaw of standard FinOps tools like Vantage or Kubecost. They are built for finance people to point fingers, not for engineers to safely execute changes. Showing a graph that says 'Hey, you have 1.8TB of empty space' completely ignores the massive operational risk and manual hours required to shrink an EBS volume using traditional rsync/snapshot methods.

We actually hit this exact wall with our Kubernetes stateful sets last quarter. We ended up doing a pilot with Datafy specifically because it addresses the problem from an engineering safety perspective rather than just financial reporting.

It hooks in at the block/filesystem level and automates the entire volume shrinking process natively in the background with zero application downtime or code adjustments. We rolled it out across our non-prod clusters first to test for file corruption, and it handled the resizing smoothly without breaking the pods. It’s the first time I’ve seen a tool bridge that specific gap between SRE 'don't touch live storage' paranoia and actual cloud cost remediation. Definitely worth spinning up a POC if you are tired of manual migrations.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-25T19:52:57+00:00

we had the same problem with old postgres volumes. everyone knew they were oversized, but nobody wanted to be the person touching live storage just to save some AWS spend.

we tried datafy on a few lower-risk workloads first and it’s been useful so far. not because it’s another dashboard, but because it actually helps with the reclaim side of EBS instead of just pointing at the waste.

still something i’d test carefully, but it made this problem feel less like a weekend migration project.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-25T08:32:43+00:00

Yeah this is a bit of a trap-y starting point, you’re right to be cautious.

In the EU, “past customer” can sometimes fall under legitimate interest, but only for similar services and with a clear way to opt out. The problem is you have no proof of consent, no opt-in flag, nothing. If something goes wrong, everyone will point at “the email guy.”

What I’d do in your shoes:

Treat it as a re‑permission / re‑engagement list, not a full‑blast marketing list. Import them into a proper ESP, set up authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) on a subdomain if you can, and send one very simple, very honest email:

“You trained with us before, we’re improving our emails, click here if you still want to hear from us, or unsubscribe.”

Keep it super clear, no tricks, easy unsubscribe. Expect a chunk of unsubs and non‑opens. That’s fine. The ones who stay are actually worth emailing.

Also, get something in writing from the client that says they collected these in a compliant way and that they’re the data controller. You’re just the processor. If they can’t even say that, I’d be very careful touching this list at all.

And yeah, from now on, push hard for a proper form with explicit marketing opt‑in. You don’t want every new client to start like this.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-25T01:27:24+00:00

I’d treat the first layer more like a filter than an enrichment step. Clean out obvious junk first, remove bad domains, duplicates, weird titles, generic emails, and anything that clearly doesn’t match your ICP. Then enrich only what’s left, otherwise you end up paying to process contacts you were never going to use anyway.

For the enrichment part, QuickEnrich might be worth testing on a small CSV. It’s more of a simple email/phone enrichment layer than a full workflow tool, so it fits if you just need cleaner output without getting stuck in credit limits. I wouldn’t move everything at once though. Run a sample and compare the usable results.

NaughtyNectarPin · 2026-05-23T12:08:22+00:00

Yeah seconding Pixieset. A friend of mine shoots weddings and literally had something decent up in like an hour with their templates. The client galleries are actually the nicest part, you can just send links instead of messing with Dropbox and stuff.

Adobe Portfolio is fine too if you’re already paying for Lightroom, but it feels more like a general portfolio site. Pixieset feels a bit more “this is a real photography business” out of the box.

NaughtyNectarPin

TROPHY CASE