Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

[alan@alanlee.org]

My story is similar to most others here.  University of Arkansas in the 
early 90s enabled user disk quotas on the public access UNIX system - a 
SPARCserver 2000 with 10 CPUs and gobs of disk.  Each quota limit was 
far higher than (total disk space) / (# user accounts).  But each of the 
17K students at the time was automatically provisioned an account during 
registration.  So it became a bit necessary to impose a limit - even if 
one 98% of users would never come close to.

The dedicated college of engineering UNIX system was also a similarly 
equipped SPARCserver 2000 and did not enforce any quotas.  Unless the 
sys-admin yelling in the hallway at the povray guy eating 100% x 10 CPUs 
was technically a throttle / quota system.  He was efficient too.  
Zero'd in on the lab and workstation number by IP address and would be 
over your shoulder in less than 10K ms if you were acting a fool!

-Alan



On 2019-05-30 09:49, David wrote:
> 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