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Currently users are on are system are only restricted by the amount of space
that is available in the home directory. Every so often a user will create a
large file and run home out of space causing users not to be able to logon. I'm
trying to find a way to restrict users to the amount of space they can use in
the home directory to prevent this from happening. I looked at the ulimit
command but it deals more with file sizes than directory sizes, does anyone know
of ways to put these restrictions on users in the home directory. THANKS!

Greg

Greg Chvatal wrote:
> Currently users are on are system are only restricted by the amount of space
> that is available in the home directory. Every so often a user will create a
> large file and run home out of space causing users not to be able to logon. I'm
> trying to find a way to restrict users to the amount of space they can use in
> the home directory to prevent this from happening. I looked at the ulimit
> command but it deals more with file sizes than directory sizes, does anyone know
> of ways to put these restrictions on users in the home directory. THANKS!
>
> Greg

Have you tried "quota" or "quotaon" and its associated file
"quota.user"? It limits users to using a set amount of disk space.

In article <1150902197.422044.43500@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups. com>,
"steven_nospam at Yahoo! Canada" <steven_nospam@yahoo.ca> writes:
>
>
> Have you tried "quota" or "quotaon" and its associated file
> "quota.user"? It limits users to using a set amount of disk space.
>

I apologize to interrupt your conversation :-)
but unless I've misread the documentation, the quota feature
is pretty useless IMHO, at least in AIX 5.2.
Of course mileages may vary, but the most common application I can imagine
would be to limit all users of group to a certain amount of disk space
*by default*, but allow a bit more for a few "power users".
sth like
edquota -g people 4GB
eqquota -u diskhog 40GB
This isn't possible, AFAIK, the whole quota system is very clumsy to use.

Michael Kraemer wrote:
> I apologize to interrupt your conversation :-)
> but unless I've misread the documentation, the quota feature
> is pretty useless IMHO, at least in AIX 5.2.

Well, I can't attest to your experience with it, but our company has
used quota to limit the amount of disk space users can obtain for their
home directories. We set a basic default for the users and then can
adjust these as we see fit.

For example, we have two employees that have to generate large monthly
queries, while many others use their home directories as a shell just
to log into an application and have very few personal files in
/home/$USER. So we set the quota hard limit to 500KB for the average
user, set the hard limit to 2GB for the two "reporting users" and the
/home file system is limited to 6GB.

If any ONE user creates a runaway file that grows and tries to use up
all the disk space in /home, they are caught by the quota and no other
users are affected by the problem. That user is stuck until the files
are cleaned up that he/she owns but otherwise the system is fine.

My suggestion would be to either try it out on a test server to get it
just the way you want it to be used, or implement it on one or two
users to see how it works. I would also avoid setting any limits for
the system users, such as root or other administrative user or group
that AIX uses.

Steve

In article <1150910748.580715.260760@c74g2000cwc.googlegroups .com>,
"steven_nospam at Yahoo! Canada" <steven_nospam@yahoo.ca> writes:
>
>
> Well, I can't attest to your experience with it, but our company has
> used quota to limit the amount of disk space users can obtain for their
> home directories. We set a basic default for the users and then can
> adjust these as we see fit.
> For example, we have two employees that have to generate large monthly
> queries, while many others use their home directories as a shell just
> to log into an application and have very few personal files in
> /home/$USER. So we set the quota hard limit to 500KB for the average
> user, set the hard limit to 2GB for the two "reporting users" and the
> /home file system is limited to 6GB.

well, apart from the fact that at our site already a single user
would fill the 6GB :-)
this is just what I tried to implement.
I didn't say it didn't work,
just the implementation is clumsy to use, since it is not part
of regular accounting, like e.g. max file size limits etc, AFAIK.
Just how do you set the limits for all of the users if you have
several dozens or even hundreds or thousands of them ?
What if more disks arrive, allowing to raise the limit ?
It is this kind of interface that is missing,
and no, I don't want to maintain another homegrown shell script
to do the job. Should be part of AIX, smit-able, of course,

I don't know how many are familiar with the LoadLeveler batch system,
but its early version(s) had a similar design flaw.
AFAIk one had to explicitly enable a user to be able to submit jobs,
it wasn't possible to enable a group as a whole.
So for each new user one had to edit the config file extra,
it wasn't part of accounting. Later versions fixed that with
the "include_groups" keyword.

Michael Kraemer wrote:
> I didn't say it didn't work,
> just the implementation is clumsy to use, since it is not part
> of regular accounting, like e.g. max file size limits etc, AFAIK.
> Just how do you set the limits for all of the users if you have
> several dozens or even hundreds or thousands of them ?
> What if more disks arrive, allowing to raise the limit ?
> It is this kind of interface that is missing,
> and no, I don't want to maintain another homegrown shell script
> to do the job. Should be part of AIX, smit-able, of course,

Ah. I see what you mean. Yes. It is not the best designed product in
the AIX arsenal. We have only 50-100 users on most of our systems and
only have to override the defaults on a few so it is no big deal...but
yes a site with 1600 or 16000 users would not want that job.