Summary: Do you run Unix without disk quotas?

[John F Carr]

In article <9DZ98Y8 at xds13.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>If you have enough disk
>space to hold the sum total of all the quotas, all you've done is create
>the equivalent a bunch of partitions without any of the advantages of the
>same. If you don't, then you haven't solved the problem of disk space abuse:
>just narrowed the window.

Narrowing the window is worth a lot in some environments.  There are users
who will use all available disk space.  With quotas, a small number of users
can not fill a partition.  We don't have the manpower to monitor disk usage
and warn users manually, and the average disk usage requires us to
overallocate disk space.  We have 10000 users but less than 10 gigabytes of
space allocated to user filesystems (as distinct from software development
or other multi-user projects).  Last time I checked, 50% of the users were
using a third of their quota or less.

If you don't want to overallocate space, quotas still have two advantages
over partitions.  Quotas can be easily changed, and if quotas are small, you
would need a large number of disk partitions.  I haven't used an operating
system that allows an unlimited number of partitions.  BSD normally allows 7
partitions per drive, AIX allows 31.

--
    John Carr (jfc at athena.mit.edu)