Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:14876 comp.unix.wizards:17255 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!oz.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely From: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: chown (was: at files and permissions) Message-ID: Date: 12 Jul 89 17:55:52 GMT References: <1894@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <669@lzaz.ATT.COM> <8072@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <34515@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <4958@ficc.uu.net> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: J Greely Followup-To: comp.unix.questions Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 44 In-reply-to: peter@ficc.uu.net's message of 12 Jul 89 09:52:03 GMT In article <4958@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: How do you allocate quotas? sum(all quotas) == free space on disk? Then you might as well give each user a seperate partition. sum(all quotas) < free space? Then you can still run out of disk space. (you do mean sum > space on that last point, don't you?) If we could use the Berkeley quota system, we would. Unfortunately, it doesn't work correctly when you mix NFS and multiple vendors. How would we set it up if we did use it? Sum(soft quotas) <= free space (about 90% sounds good) Sum(hard quotas) > free space Set the soft quotas to a slightly generous estimate for each user type, and set the hard quotas to a very generous estimate (1.5-2.5 times the soft quota). If soft quotas are properly chosen, most users will remain below them, leaving free space for the people who need to go over temporarily. If someone needs a larger quota, and there's not enough room on the current partition, you juggle people around partitions until they all fit. Don't try to make the quota system unbreakable. If someone wants to be a bad boy, you'll catch them. Don't burn honest users... you're not a cop. (Does that imply that cops burn honest citizens?) We can't use real quotas, so we're stuck with a fake quota system (set quotas for each user on each filesystem, run quot and compare, mail warnings and summary). When that isn't enough, things get rude. More than once, I *have* felt like a cop, tracking down an anonymous grad student who logs in once a week, doesn't read his mail, and has a ten meg file named thesis-proj.out. Should I delete it? Compress it? Dump it to tape? Pick on someone else, and find out later it was garbage? Nuke it, and find out that it was in use by a program vital to his research? And of course, not everyone who drastically exceeds their quota is a "bad boy". Ignorance and laziness are tied as the primary reasons for unreasonable disk usage around here. The steady state of disks is full. -- Ken Thompson -=- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)