Scribbling feverishly on April 08, Douglas J Hunley managed to emit: > Morning all: > I have a client that wants to migrate to Linux from Solaris, but one of their > main "gotchas" is the quota support in Linux. They believe (as do I) that > quotas seem to be the first thing broken (and the last thing fixed) whever a > change is introduced into the fs or block layers of the kernel. They > currently have a *very* detailed accounting system in place that charges > their internal customers (departments) based on disk usage, CPU usage, > network utilization, etc. They don't want to lose any of this when they go to > Linux. I believe I have solutions for everything but the disk quotas. > However, I have what I think is a neat idea for solving the disk issue. I > would like opinions.
Last I checked, the quota support worked just fine. I wrote about using it in my last book, which used kernel 2.4.7. > What I propose is this: > 1. create /loops on the main disk server > 2. for each user on the system, use 'dd' to preallocate a file in /loops: > dd if=/dev/zero of=/loops/joe bs=1k count=10240 > which would create a 10M (if my math is right) file called /loops/joe > 3. chown joe:users /loops/joe > 4. configure the automounter to mount the newly allocated file as joe's $HOME > mount -o loop /loops/joe /home/joe This sounds like an administrative nightmare. Maybe not now, but it isn't hard to imagine it quickly becoming one. > Obviously, I would have to create a local 'create user' script to allocate the > file, and add the entry into the automounter config. > > The biggest caveat I can see is that "joe" would be charged for 10M even if he > only used 2M. I already ran this concerns by them, and they seemed OK with > it. They said they would be happy selling disk in chunks like this. And we > could always "extend" the allocation be creating a joe2 of the new size, and > then copying the contents over and moving joe2 over top of joe. > > This will free them from worrying about whether or not the current quota code > is working properly, and would easily enforce the hard limit. (there's no way > that joe could write 11M of stuff. he'd get ENOSPACE). > > Thoughts? My main thought is that it seems complicated and I don't hear that you've actually investigated whether or not the quota code is still working. And, as I said, the quota stuff worked just fine in 2.4.7 and I haven't seen anything to the effect that it wasn't or isn't. The principle is KISS. Kurt -- Excellent time to become a missing person. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
