[TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 5/30/2019 8:21 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem
> quotas.
>
> At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the
> Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view:
>
> 	Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo
> 	ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from
> 	getting their work done.

You've never had people like me on your systems ;) - But yeah...

> For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on
> Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months,
> on GNU/Linux CentOS 7.
>
I do the same with ZFS - limit the individual filesystems with "zfs set 
quota=xxx" so the entire pool can't be filled. I assign a zfs filesystem 
to an individual user in /export/home and when they need more, they let 
me know. Various monitoring scripts tell me when a filesystem is 
approaching 80%, and I either just expand it on my own because of the 
user's usage, or let them know they are approaching the limit.

Same thing with Netbackup Basic Disk pools in a common ZFS pool. I can 
adjust them as needed, and Netbackup sees the change almost immediately.

At home, I did this with my kids ;) - Samba and zfs quota on the 
filesystem let them know how much room they had.

art k.

PS: I'm starting to move to FreeBSD and ZFS for VMware datastores, the 
performance is outstanding over iSCSI on 10Gbe - (which Solaris 11's 
COMSTAR is not apparently very good at especially with small block 
sizes). I have yet to play with Linux and ZFS but would appreciate to 
hear (privately, if it's not appropriate for the list) your experiences 
with it.