User Quota:

Monitoring and controlling disk space usage is another important part of a system administrator tasks. User quota is used to restrict the amount of disk space on each partition by each user.

Steps

1. Edit the file /etc/fstab

# vi /etc/fstab

Search the following line

“LABEL=/home /home etx3 defaults 1 2”

Just add ‘usrquota’ after the word ‘defaults” as and grpquota for group

“LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults,usrquota 1 2”

2. Remount the home partrition

# mount –o remount /home

Where –o I used to active comma separator used in fstab

After given a quota we must remount the directory with user quota or if we restart the system , it automatically remount.

3. Now check the mount quota

# quotacheck –avum

Where

-a : Scan file system with quota enabled

-v : Verbose mode

-u : Scan for user quota

-m : Remount file system with quota enabled

4. Now check the /home

#cd /home

#ls

File aquota.user will created)

5. Now add quota for particular user

# edquota –u username

Output of this command

File System Block soft hard inode soft hard

/dev/hda2 24 0 0 9 0 0

1 block=1Kbyte

Suppose we set the userquota by block size i.e we set the soft limit to 3000 and Hard limit to 4000 i.e. 3M and 4M

/dev/hda2 25 3000 4000 9 0 0

Block and inode has a grace period of 7 days ( by default)

We can set the quota either by setting blocks soft and hard limit of inode ( Number of maximum file created)

6. Make the quota on

# quotaon /home

7. We can generate the quota information

#repquota /home

Note:

We can generate the file of big size to check the quota

Syntax:

#dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=3

To check the quota for particular user after login

#quota

To set the grace period for particular user

#edquota –T username

To assign quota of one user to another user

#edquota –p user1 user2

We can also set the quota for particular user by using following command.

#setquota -u username 2000 3000 20 25 /home