Ch28 : Managing Disk Usage with Quotas. You may eventually need to restrict the amount of disk space used on each partition by each user or group of users as your disk drives become filled with data.
The disk quota feature of RedHat/Fedora Linux enables you to do this, and the setup is fairly simple. For example, your family Linux server is running out of space in the /home filesystem because of an abundance of MP3 downloads. Enter Single-User Mode As you'll need to remount the /home filesystem, you make sure that no other users or processes are using it by first entering single-user mode from the console. If you are certain that you're the only user on the system, you might be able to skip this step. 1) Use the who command to see which users are logged in.
[root@bigboy tmp]# who root pts/0 Nov 6 14:46 (192-168-1-242.my-site.com) bob pts/0 Nov 6 12:01 (192-168-1-248.my-site.com) bunny pts/0 Nov 6 16:25 (192-168-1-250.my-site.com) [root@bigboy tmp]# wall The system is shutting down now! [root@bigboy tmp]# init 1 Simple eh? Testing. Quota mini-HOWTO. Next Previous Contents Ralf van Dooren r.vdooren@snow.nl v0.5, 2003-08-09 Preamble: This document is written by Ralf van Dooren (r.vdooren@snow.nl).
Original text and setup of this document is copyleft-ed by Albert M.C. Tam, many thanks to him for this initial mini-HOWTO. This document describes how to enable file system quota on a Linux host, assigning quota for users and groups, as well as the usage of miscellaneous quota commands. Feel free to send feedbacks or comments to r.vdooren@snow.nl if you find an error, or if any information is missing. Disk Quotas in GNU/Linux explained. CentOS Enterprise Linux 4 System Administration Guide - Implementing Disk Quotas. Disk space can be restricted by implementing disk quotas which alert a system administrator is alerted before a user consumes too much disk space or a partition becomes full.
Disk quotas can be configured for individual users as well as user groups. This kind of flexibility makes it possible to give each user a small quota to handle "personal" files (such as email and reports), while allowing the projects they work on to have more sizable quotas (assuming the projects are given their own groups). In addition, quotas can be set not just to control the number of disk blocks consumed but to control the number of inodes (data structures that contain information about files in UNIX file systems). Because inodes are used to contain file-related information, this allows control over the number of files that can be created.
The quota RPM must be installed to implement disk quotas. To implement disk quotas, use the following steps: 13.1.1. As root, using a text editor, edit the /etc/fstab file. 5 Steps to Setup User and Group Disk Quota on UNIX / Linux. On Linux, you can setup disk quota using one of the following methods: File system base disk quota allocationUser or group based disk quota allocation On the user or group based quota, following are three important factors to consider: Hard limit – For example, if you specify 2GB as hard limit, user will not be able to create new files after 2GBSoft limit – For example, if you specify 1GB as soft limit, user will get a warning message “disk quota exceeded”, once they reach 1GB limit.
But, they’ll still be able to create new files until they reach the hard limitGrace Period – For example, if you specify 10 days as a grace period, after user reach their hard limit, they would be allowed additional 10 days to create new files. In that time period, they should try to get back to the quota limit. 1. First, you should specify which filesystem are allowed for quota check. The following example indicates that both user and group quota check is enabled on /home filesystem 2. In the above command: