The effects of soft quotas are relatively easy to implement. 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.
Since you need to be root on a hosts.equiv machine to do an rsh quota report on the netapps, you'll probably need a setuid root binary wrapper to actually do the rsh, but that's fairly simple to accomplish. Then set your physical quotas in the /etc/quotas file to be your _hard_ limit, and establish another file (which the netapps doesn't see) containing soft limits to compare to the real values.
We do this all through our database engines for thousands of accounts, poll the server on a very frequent basis, and everything works extremely well. There may be a couple of bugs where the numbers returned are slightly off (and in at least one case, negative), but these have been very rare and quite transitory, so I haven't pinned down whether there's really a bug or just a pookah.
--David Schairer Director, Core Technology Concentric Network Corp.
On Wed, Nov 12, 1997 at 11:47:42AM -0600, sirbruce@ix.netcom.com had written:
On 11/12/97 09:36:10 you wrote:
CIFS is new to the NetApp boxen and it seems to work pretty well, but NFS was your first baby and you have not done anything yet to help us in this world who need one item - soft quotas.
There may be some confusion as to *exactly* what you mean by soft quotas, and how they work. Someone once asked me that the next time someone mentioned this, to ask them to PLEASE explain what you expect the soft quotas to do, how they work, and how they currently work on your other (say, Sun) machines.
I have answered this question many times, and I am sick of it.
Go onto your own SunOS or Solaris system and try it yourself, soft quotas have been around for a very long time and so far, I have not heard a single technical reason why it should not work.
FreeBSD does it, shoddy Linux does it, hell, I can't name a unix system off the top of my head that doesn't.
Is it so much to ask?
I have been asking this question since late 1994 of my local sales rep, and I have talked with NetApp engineers.
-- Mike Horwath IRC: Drechsau LIFE: Lover drechsau@yuck.net Visi: info@visi.com drechsau@Geeks.ORG Twin Cities area Internet Access: 612-288-0880 for more info The founding member of Minn. Coalition for Internet Accessibility