On Wed, Nov 12, 1997 at 01:33:48PM -0800, Guy Harris had written:
My understanding of soft quotas is that, say, you give a user a soft quota of 20 MB and a hard quota of 50 MB.
If they are over their soft quota, then when they log in, and every time they try to write out a file, it succeeds, but also gives them a message saying, "You're over quota. Fix it."
If they're over their hard quota, it just doesn't succeed.
Does anyone else have a different impression?
Yes - I do.
It is good to have opinions.
I have the impression that, over NFS, attempts to write to a file that put you over your soft quota give *NO MESSAGE WHATSOEVER*.
I have that impression because I've seen the NFS client code in, at least, SunOS 4.x (back when I worked at Sun and then at Auspex), and because I know that the NFS protocol has no mechanism to return a "this write succeeded but it went over your soft quota" indication; only the server knows that a write went over the soft quota, and it has no mechanism to communicate that to the client.
It might be time to check out something later than SunOS 4.1.1 then.
4.1.3 and above, for sure, return a warning that you have gone over your soft quota, and the write succeeds. Solaris 2.x also works as expected.
You are also given a grace period, by default it is 7 days, to bring your usage back below the soft quota, or it turns into a hard quota at the end of the period.
What I don't understand is that this kind of item has been asked about for years and nothing has been done about it, yet CIFS is implemented quickly and even ACLs are added before this long-sought-after feature.
I don't care if NFS by spec doesn't support it, most every UNIX system does.
Do not be confused by the fact that you get a warning if you go over the soft quota on a *local* file system - what counts here is whether you get when when you go over it on an *NFS-mounted* file system, and, at best, what you get there is a message from the "quota" command, which some UNIXes run as part of the login process.
Thanks, I am now an idiot because I can't tell the difference between a locally mounted filesystem and a filesystem mounted from a remote host.
You are full of yourself and what you think might be right.
Have you even tried this yourself in the last 10 years?
Soft quotas work, whether it is on a local filesystem, or over NFS, between SunOS and Solaris systems.
I am sorry you don't understand this.