With 4.1c quotas have improved by allowing restrictions on users in a specific tree - which makes me wonder how people are using quotas. One use is clearly limiting space users can use to force them to use space wisely. A more important use seems to be restricting certain areas from growing too large and preventing other areas from running out of space. For instance, you don't want a user directory preventing incoming mail from being written.
In this case, what could be useful in addition to an upper limit on directory sizes is having a guaranteed minimum space for a directory. For example, reserving 1 GB for incoming mail regardless of the constraints on other areas. This would add extra complexity and might not even be possible - has anyone else considered this to be possibly useful?
Quotas also seem to be a bit confusing in that the /etc/quotas file defines all the quotas, and 'quota on' or 'quota resize' activates the quotas, but you have to create a quota directory via 'quota qtree'. This means you can't just add an existing directory to /etc/quotas and run quota off/on to enforce quotas on it, and that qtrees and entries in /etc/quotas can be out of sync. It seems more sensible just to have the /etc/quotas file and quota on/off/resize.
Dave Heiland dheiland@lucent.com