📝 devlog v6 [ 2025-12-07 ]

- concern arising from space available on microcluster nodes
- native emmc has ~1.81gb space free on both nodes, most likely logs, crash dumps, apt cache and unused/stopped containers
- decided to utilise bash & cron by writing a simple script that compresses old logs, cleans apt cache, removes any build artifacts, old kernels, containers and temp files
- this will run everyday at midnight on both nodes.

🔍 insights

- realised my crontab wasnt working; remembered i did not run crontab -e as sudo/root, which means it only ran for the current user. some of the script commands require root priveleges therefore script would fail.

- these nodes are at the limit i can push already for running a small microcluster; which is my reasoning for using external nvme drives via usb. ssds would hit the same usb 2.0 bottleneck and have a smaller form factor; using nvme drives also means i can utilise some coolers i have lying around, which will keep the drives at a very cool temperature.

- by removing logs and unused artifacts i freed up over a gb of space and careful use will keep the cluster nodes at around 2.80gb free; which is viable for my purposes:

only build rust projects on the core node. being a cm5 it will compile them faster with its extra ram and native nvme speeds.

c projects can be built on both nodes, as gcc uses much less space, mcu code could also be compiled and flashed here as picotool uses minimal space also

any large projects, code or even containers could be stored on the external nvme drives, keeping the nodes emmc at a useable 2.80gb