If quotas are implemented, they need some maintenance —
mostly in the form of watching to see if the quotas are exceeded
and making sure the quotas are accurate. Of course, if users
repeatedly exceeds their quotas or consistently reaches their soft
limits, a system administrator has a few choices to make depending
on what type of users they are and how much disk space impacts
their work. The administrator can either help the user determine
how to use less disk space or increase the user's disk quota if
needed.
It is possible to disable quotas without setting them to be 0.
To turn all user and group quotas off, use the following
command:
If neither the -u or -g options are specified, only the user quotas are
disabled. If only -g is specified, only
group quotas are disabled.
To enable quotas again, use the quotaon
command with the same options.
For example, to enable user and group quotas for all file
systems, use the following command:
To enable quotas for a specific file system, such as /home, use the following command:
If neither the -u or -g options are specified, only the user quotas are
enabled. If only -g is specified, only
group quotas are enabled.
Creating a disk usage report entails running the repquota utility. For example, the command
repquota /home produces this output:
*** Report for user quotas on device /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
Block grace time: 7days; Inode grace time: 7days
Block limits File limits
User used soft hard grace used soft hard grace
----------------------------------------------------------------------
root -- 36 0 0 4 0 0
kristin -- 540 0 0 125 0 0
testuser -- 440400 500000 550000 37418 0 0
|
To view the disk usage report for all (option -a) quota-enabled file systems, use the command:
While the report is easy to read, a few points should be
explained. The -- displayed
after each user is a quick way to determine whether the block or
inode limits have been exceeded. If either soft limit is exceeded,
a + appears in place of the
corresponding -; the first
- represents the block limit,
and the second represents the inode limit.
The grace columns are
normally blank. If a soft limit has been exceeded, the column
contains a time specification equal to the amount of time remaining
on the grace period. If the grace period has expired, none appears in its place.
Whenever a file system is not unmounted cleanly (due to a system
crash, for example), it is necessary to run quotacheck. However, quotacheck can be run on a regular basis, even if
the system has not crashed. Running the following command
periodically keeps the quotas more accurate (the options used have
been described in Section 13.1.1
Enabling Quotas):
The easiest way to run it periodically is to use cron. As root, either use the crontab -e command to schedule a periodic quotacheck or place a script that runs quotacheck in any one of the following directories
(using whichever interval best matches your needs):
-
/etc/cron.hourly
-
/etc/cron.daily
-
/etc/cron.weekly
-
/etc/cron.monthly
The most accurate quota statistics can be obtained when the file
system(s) analyzed are not in active use. Thus, the cron task
should be schedule during a time where the file system(s) are used
the least. If this time is various for different file systems with
quotas, run quotacheck for each file
system at different times with multiple cron tasks.
Refer to Chapter 35 Automated
Tasks for more information about configuring cron.
