Re: RFC - tree quotas for Linux (2.4.12, ext2)

[Neil Brown]

On Friday October 19, [e-mail] wrote:
> 
> 
> >However I actually want to charge usage to users.
> >There is a natural mapping from users to directory trees via the
> >concept of the home-directory.  It is home directories that I want to
> >impose quotas on.  So it seems natural to charge space usage to a
> >users.
> 
> 
> The use I can see for tree quotas whould be quite divorced from
> accounts or users. Currently if you want limit the amount of
> space the say /tmp, /home or /var/mail uses you need to put
> it on a separate partition, but if you could put a quota 
> on a tree you'd have a much more flexible systema adminstration
> tool to control the disk space used by each particular function.

This relates to Rik's idea of having a treequota on "/home/students"
which would apply to all students, not any one user.

One issue here is: how do you tell the quota-system what constitutes a
   tree, for quota purposes.

NetworkAppliances have had treequotas on their filer for quite some
time, and I believe that you have to create quota trees explicitly
with "qtree create"

I would rather not have to add such a new command if I can avoid it.

For the above senarios,  I would simply create an accout called "tmp"
or "home" or "mail" (you might have that one already) or "student",
assign a quota to that account, and chown the directory appropriately.
Afterall, there is no real reason why /tmp should be owned by "root".
Any "system" account should be fine.

Can anyone else see a good way to flag an inode as "root-of-a-qtree"
that does not require a new command and does not relate to uids?

NeilBrown

> 
> I quite like the idea of the quota being related to an inode.
> -- 
>  Toivo Pedaste                        Email:  [e-mail]
>  University Communications Services,  Phone:  [phone]
>  University of Western Australia      Fax:    [phone]
> "The time has come", the Walrus said, "to talk of many things"...
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to [e-mail]
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/