disk quotas

[Robert Elz]

In article <118 at desint.UUCP>, geoff at desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) writes:
> If Berkeley (or AT&T) would put as much effort into
> the disk-full problem as was put into "swkill()" in 4.2, I bet you'd happily
> stop using quotas.

I would love to somehow handle full disk conditions gracefully,
but can you suggest how?

Swap errors (swkill stuff) is easy - kill the process with the problem.
If the system had paniced the process would be killed anyway, so its
no worse off, and the rest of the processes are considerably better
off for not panicing.

But how do I handle a full disk?  Killing some random process won't
fix it (not even killing ones writing to the full filesys).
I could just delete some random files - but somehow I suspect their
owners might get upset.

So, does anyone have any good suggestions on how to sensibly handle
full discs?  The problem is really one of user control - only users
know which of the allocated blocks on the disk contain useful information,
and which contain trash.

This seems to be a situation where avoiding the problem (by simply
plugging in another eagle every week for preference, disk quotas
if that answer isn't viable) is the only reasonable action.

Robert Elz					ucbvax!kre