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* Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?
@ 2019-05-30 16:04 Noel Chiappa
  2019-05-30 16:48 ` KatolaZ
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 32+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2019-05-30 16:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: KatolaZ

    > I remember a 5MB quota at uni when I was an undergrad, and I definitely
    > remember when it was increased to 10MB :)

Light your cigar with disk blocks!

When I was in high school, I had an account on the school's computer, a
PDP-11/20 running RSTS, with a single RF11 disk (well, technically, an RS11
drive on an RF11 controller). For those whose jaw didn't bounce off the floor,
reading that, the RS11 was a fixed-head disk with a total capacity of 512KB
(1024 512-byte blocks).

IIRC, my disk quota was 5 blocks. :-)

	Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 32+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?
@ 2019-05-31  0:21 Nelson H. F. Beebe
  2019-05-31  0:37 ` Larry McVoy
  2019-05-31  0:42 ` Arthur Krewat
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 32+ messages in thread
From: Nelson H. F. Beebe @ 2019-05-31  0:21 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem
quotas.

At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the
Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view:

	Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo
	ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from
	getting their work done.

Thus, in my 41 years of systems management at Utah, we have not had a
SINGLE SYSTEM with user disk quotas enabled.

We have run PDP-11s with RT-11, RSX, and RSTS, PDP-10s with TOPS-20,
VAXes with VMS and BSD Unix, an Ardent Titan, a Stardent, a Cray
EL/94, and hundreds of Unix workstations from Apple, DEC, Dell, HP,
IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun with numerous CPU families (Alpha, Arm, MC68K,
SPARC, MIPS, NS 88000, PowerPC, x86, x86_64, and maybe others that I
forget at the moment).

For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on
Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months,
on GNU/Linux CentOS 7.

Each ZFS dataset gets its space from a large shared pool of disks, and
each dataset has a quota: thus, space CAN fill up in a given dataset,
so that some users might experience a disk-full situation.  In
practice, that rarely happens, because a cron job runs every 20
minutes, looking for datasets that are nearly full, and giving them a
few extra GB if needed.  Affected users in a average of 10 minutes or
so will no longer see disk-full problems.  If we see serious imbalance
in the sizes of previously similar-sized datasets, we manually move
directory trees between datasets to achieve a reasonable balance, and
reset the dataset quotas.

We make nightly ZFS snapshots (hourly for user home directories), and
send the nightlies to an off-campus server in a large datacenter, and
we write nightly filesystem backs to a tape robot. The tape technology
generations have evolved through 9-track, QIC, 4mm DAT, 8mm DAT, DLT,
LTO-4, LTO-6, and perhaps soon, LTO-8.

Our main fileserver talks through a live SAN FibreChannel mirror to
independent storage arrays in two different buildings.

Thus, we always have two live copies of all data, and third far-away
live copy that is no more than 24 hours old.

Yes, we do see runaway output files from time to time, and an
occasional student (among currently more than 17,000 accounts) who
uses an unreasonable amount of space.  In such cases, we deal with the
job, or user, involved, and get space freed up; other users remain
largely remain unaware of the temporary space crisis.

The result of our no-quotas policy is that few of our users have ever
seen a disk-full condition; they just get on with their work, as they,
and we, expect them to do.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 32+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?
@ 2019-05-30 13:49 David
  2019-05-30 14:23 ` Diomidis Spinellis
                   ` (13 more replies)
  0 siblings, 14 replies; 32+ messages in thread
From: David @ 2019-05-30 13:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did.

So, anyone ever use this feature?

	David


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 32+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-06-04 14:05 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 32+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-05-30 16:04 [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? Noel Chiappa
2019-05-30 16:48 ` KatolaZ
2019-05-30 17:42   ` ron
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-05-31  0:21 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2019-05-31  0:37 ` Larry McVoy
2019-05-31  0:42 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-05-31 15:05   ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
2019-05-31 16:06     ` Michael Kjörling
2019-05-31 16:15       ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-05-31 16:38         ` Michael Kjörling
2019-05-31 15:55   ` Rico Pajarola
2019-05-30 13:49 David
2019-05-30 14:23 ` Diomidis Spinellis
2019-05-30 14:26 ` Dan Cross
2019-05-30 14:27 ` Rico Pajarola
2019-05-31  7:16   ` George Ross
2019-05-30 14:29 ` Robert Brockway
2019-05-30 14:34 ` Theodore Ts'o
2019-05-30 14:48   ` John P. Linderman
2019-05-30 14:57     ` Jim Geist
2019-05-30 14:55 ` Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri
2019-05-30 15:00 ` KatolaZ
2019-05-30 17:28 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-05-30 19:19 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-05-30 20:42 ` Warner Losh
2019-05-30 22:23   ` George Michaelson
2019-05-31  1:36 ` alan
2019-05-31 19:07 ` Pete Wright
2019-05-31 20:43   ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-05-31 20:59     ` Pete Wright
2019-06-01  0:30 ` reed
2019-06-04 13:50 ` Tony Finch

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