Re: Thoughts on Quotas

[Rumko <rumcic@xxxxxxxxx>]

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Stathis Kamperis wrote:

> 2010/9/28 Rumko <rumcic@gmail.com>:
>> Stathis Kamperis wrote:
>>
>>> 2010/9/28 Sdävtaker <sdavtaker@gmail.com>:
>>>> What i tried to sai about history was that user usage should be
>>>> measured in a different bag than the history that the user usage
>>>> generated.
>>>> Sorry if it was not clear, english is not my main language and i use
>>>> to fail time to time. :-/
>>>> Damian
>>>>
>>>
>>> I kind of agree.
>>>
>>> Why "punish" user for something that s/he is not able to control
>>> directly ? Even more, the user may not be aware of the underlying
>>> filesystem's technicalities (how it retains history and so on).
>>>
>>> Better come up with something else.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Stathis
>>
>> Not punishing that user means punishing the whole system and everything
>> depending on that system. And as I said before, it's user's data, so who
>> should be punished if not the user? The user can always tell the admin that
>> he does not any history at all or how much history he needs, so it's purely
>> that user's responsibility ... his data, his rules, his reponsibility.
>> [...]
> 
> Ok, fine. I'm not strongly opinionated on this. I'm just thinking from
> the Josephine perspective, who may not (or even want to) know how her
> file-system operates.

Then that user's home dir can be nohistory and there is no problem?
If she doesn't need multiple copies of her data, then I see no reason why to
keep that data. But if she wants n snapshots/backups then there should be a
limit on how much total space she can take. Otherwise we could just display
du -h of her home dir when she logs in and it would be about as useful at
limiting her disk usage, so there would be no point to a quota ;)
On purpose she could bring down the whole system at will even though she
was "limited", but unfortunately she could do it unknowingly as well
(downloading flash videos, powerpoint jokes, maybe a movie or two, etc. over
and over and rewriting the old files).

> But if we go this route, then we should also provide history retention
> statistics to user-land utilities, such as df(1).
> 
> Imagine the confusion of a user that types 'df', sees that the quota
> threshold hasn't been reached, yet she is denied further disk storage
> allocation.

Agreed, now we just need to find someone to do it :P

> Best regards,
> Stathis

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Regards,
Rumko