“When someone talks about quotas, do you immediately think of
the Soviet Union’s five-year plans and seldom-met production goals?
Well, think again. Quotas are an essential part of a Linux system
administrator’s duties—even if no other users have access to
the system you’re using. Sooner or later, you’ll set up a
server that exists for no other purpose than to provide network
users with additional disk space. To prevent certain users from
filling up the disk at the expense of other users’ privileges, you
need to establish quotas that will give each user a fixed amount of
space.”
“Although quotas are so important, documentation on the subject
is surprisingly scarce. Most entry- or intermediate-level Linux
books, including the Linux Documentation Project’s System
Administrator’s Guide, don’t cover this topic. There’s a very good
Quota mini-HOWTO, but it’s out-of-date. O’Reilly’s Essential System
Administration provides background information, but it’s too
focused on UNIX utilities. In this Daily Drill Down, I’ll explain
how to create, define, and manage user and group disk usage quotas
on a Linux system. I’ll also discuss the latest versions of the key
underlying utilities and several user-friendly packages that make
quota-setting much easier, including Kmuser, a KDE utility that’s
currently tracking 200 student users in a German school.”
“System administrators with root privileges on a Linux system
can establish quotas for any users on their systems. They also can
establish quotas for groups. Whether you’re establishing quotas for
users or for groups, you can assign as much or as little disk space
to each user as you please; however, you’ll probably want to assign
the same restrictions to all users. For example, in schools that
set up accounts for students in programming classes, each student
may have a soft limit of 20 megabytes.”