Some Terms in quota

 

Hard Block Limit - The absolute maximum amount of disk space that a user or group can use. Once this limit is reached, no further disk space can be used.

Soft Block Limit -  the maximum amount of disk space that can be used. However, unlike the hard limit, the soft limit can be exceeded for a certain amount of time. That period is called Grace Period.

Grace Period – It can be expressed in seconds, minutes, hours,
      days, weeks, or months.

     If any of the values are set to 0, that limit is not set.

Implementing Quotas for User

#  edquota username
 
   
     Perform this step for each user who needs a quota.

    For example , output will be as follows,
Disk quotas for user testuser (uid 501): Filesystem blocks soft hard inodes
      soft hard /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02  440436  0  0  37418  0  0

 

The text editor defined by the EDITOR environment variable is used by edquota.

Configuring Disk Quotas

1. Enable quotas per file system by modifying the /etc/fstab file.
2. Remount the file systems.
3. Create the quota database files and generate the disk usage table.
4. Assign quota policies.

   Each of these steps is discussed in detail in the following sections.

Disk Quotas

Main Points about Disk Quotas

Disk space can be restricted by implementing disk quotas.

It alert a system administrator before a user consumes too much disk space or a partition becomes full.

Disk quotas can be configured for individual users as well as user groups.

In addition, quotas can be set not just to control the number of disk blocks consumed but to control the number of inodes.

Because inodes are used to contain file-related information, this allows control over the number of files that can be created.