Steve Armijo writes:

and actually, if you are doing quotas by name ( can you do them by uid?) then the filer would also need to have access to the passwd file.

You can do quotas by name, but I recommend to do them by uid.

On an F330, it took over 2 minutes to read /etc/quotas which has ~2700 entries (/etc/passwd has ~5800 entries) when we specified user quotas by name. Changing our quota generation script to uids reduced that to 2 seconds!