[TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, 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

At my current workplace, we use quotas on shared systems (Linux
compute clusters and multi-user interactive login nodes).  When I was
at univeristy (early 1990's), the SunOS and Solaris systems at the
department had the home directories mounted over NFS, and there were
quotas in effect on the file server.

On VM systems that I set up privately, where /home is not on a separate
partition, I use quotas for my own account (because sometimes I want to
use a really tiny disk, and limiting the size of /home is easier with
quotas than through partitioning off the correct size on the first try).

I have access to a shared non-work related OpenBSD and Linux system
which does *not* use quotas, and it makes me slightly nervous because
I don't actually know how much disk space I'm *allowed* to use without
being told off by a human operator.  It would have been better if they
had had quotas enabled and then made it easy to ask for more space
thourgh a simple email to the admins.

-- 
Kusalananda
Sweden