4.2 BSD Disk Quotas -- What are your experiences with it?

[Anthony V. Discolo]

>> I am considering beginning to run the disk quota software.
>> If you have used it, please let me know how well it worked.
>> Were there bugs which needed fixing?  Do you have the
>> fixes?  Etc?
>> -- 
>> 	-- Art Zemon
>> 	   FileNet Corp.
>> 	   ...! {decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax} !trwrb!felix!zemon

> The disk quotas work pretty well.  We use them here on our instructional
> systems.  I don't remember any bug fixes, but I do know of one bug...
> If you update a disk quota for a person who is logged in (or has a process
> running with his/her uid) the machine will crash with a panic in the
> quota routines.  So, generally, set quotas when the machine is in single.
> If you change them while it is up multiuser (new users is an exception,
> chances of them being logged in is minimal) you can crash things.

You don't have to bring the system down to single user mode to update
quotas, just use "/etc/quotaoff filesystem" to turn off quotas on that
filesystem.  Then after you're done, use "/etc/quotaon filesystem" to
turn quotas back on.

Quotas have worked well for us also, once we installed them.  It was
kind of a pain to install them though, since we had to find out how
much disk space everyone was using (not hard), and then increment their
usage by some constant (also not hard), and format that data for a
program to set their quota.

I also have a few general purpose quota programs that (safely) diddle
with quotas, like given a block amount (+ or -), a filesystem, and a
list of users, add the amount to each user's quota on that filesystem.
(This is very hard to do with edquota(8)).  If anyone would like the
source for these, please send me mail.
-- 

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