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.
