Actually, it works great for us, but I control all the applications through other OS-level implants, so I can throttle apps at a hard limit as appropriate.
If you have no hard quotas, just set the hard quotas in /etc/quotas to some amount that will never realistically be reached, such as the size of the filesystem :)
--DRS
David Schairer penned:
The effects of soft quotas are relatively easy to implement.
Assuming one has hard quotas available.
We've got a system with many thousands of 'soft' quotas running off of netapps servers. Remember that with the 'quota report' command, you can find the level of usage in real time for any quota ID. You can put a wrapper around this to check a quota very rapidly -- not rapidly enough to plug directly into realtime applications, but fast enough for use in, say, a .login message.
However, if one's site's policy is to allow users as much disk space as they need temporarily, in which case hard quotas are not set, this does not work.
Regards,
David K. Drum david@more.net -- It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line. [1] Reality has a tendency to be so uncomfortably real. [2] You can only measure the size of your head from the inside. [3] When you proceed deliberately, mistakes don't cascade, they instruct. [4] [1] Vernor Vinge [2] Neil Peart [3] Larry Wall [4] Stewart Brand