Sep
Implementing quotas to restrict disk space usage
My latest article on Linux.com discusses implementing disk quotas to restrict a users’ disk space usage.
From the article:
If you manage a system that’s accessed by multiple users, you might have a user who hogs the disk space. Using disk quotas you can limit the amount of space available to each user. It’s fairly easy to set up quotas, and once you are done you will be able to control the number of inodes and blocks owned by any user or group.
The article made it to LXer and someone raised a very interesting point. He says
the more they stay the same. Disk space quotas were a standard operating procedure for sys. admins. in the ’80′s when disk storage was mega-expensive. I see the point in putting *some* limits on users, but let’s hope that sys. admins. aren’t so tight-fisted these days now that disk storage is cheap.
I agree with him entirely. But, and I’m not trying to defend myself or the article, I would like to clarify that implementing quotas should still be standard practice. And, since it’s so easy to limit errant users on a multi-user system, I’d suggest people to set it up on their home systems too. The reason being that despite storage being so cheap nowadays, how can you ever justify buying a new hard drive every so often. For instance, let’s suppose you are running out of disk space because of someone who downloads songs from the various file sharing networks. Now, you can either restrict the disk space he can fill up with these downloaded songs, or you can buy a new hard drive and let the user fill it up as well. It’s my opinion that sooner rather than later he would get tired of his songs and may never want to listen to them again. So, how do you justify buying a new disk when the old one is free again since he’s either deleted all the songs, or made a DVD backup?
It’s best to limit him to just X amount of space so he can only download Y number of songs, that he’d have to either backup or delete if he wants to download more songs.
Anyway, read the article and decide for yourself if you wish to curb an errant user by implementing quotas.
