Other Quota Topics

Other Quota Topics

Creating disk quotas frequently isn't enough. You also have to manage the process by reviewing the quota needs of each user and adjusting them according to the policies of your company. You'll need to make Linux scan its hard disks periodically to check for exceeded quotas. This section describes the most common quota management activities.

Editing Grace Periods

The edquota -t command sets the grace period for each filesystem. Like the edquota -u command, it invokes the vi editor.

The grace period is a time limit before the soft limit is enforced for a quota-enabled file system. You can use time units of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. This is what you'll see with the command edquota -t:

     [root@bigboy tmp]# edquota -t

     Grace period before enforcing soft limits for users:
     Time units may be: days, hours, minutes, or seconds
       Filesystem             Block grace period     Inode grace period
       /dev/hda3                     7days                  7days

Editing Group Quotas

Editing quotas on a per-group basis can be done similarly with the edquota -g command.

Getting Quota Reports

The repquota command lists quota usage limits of all users on the system:

     [root@bigboy tmp]# repquota /home
     *** Report for user quotas on device /dev/hda3
     Block grace time: 7days; Inode grace time: 7days
                             Block limits                 File limits
     User            used    soft    hard  grace    used   soft  hard  grace
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     root      --   52696       0       0           1015      0     0
     ...
     ...
     ...
     mp3user   --      24       0       0              7      0     0

     [root@bigboy tmp]#