disk quotas

[Don Speck]

    Cit-vax is our general-use machine, with undergraduate classes,
grad students, and professors.	It used to have disk quotas, but
when I was made system manager, I turned them off.  Why?  I noticed
that quota policy was primarily directed against class accounts,
which didn't stick around long enough to accumulate much in the
way of files; meanwhile, those in most need of restraint (the long-
time users of the machine) had infinite or extremely large quotas,
and disk usage to match.  The disks were always full.

    I turned off quotas because they were not serving to keep the
disk from running out of space, rather, they were serving to enforce
class distinctions.  Of course, my decision may have been colored by
having been at the low end of this class structure before becoming
system manager... and my inability to say "no".

				Don Speck   speck at cit-vax.arpa