User/Group disk quota enabling in Linux/Unix

Now we are going to see how to enable User/Group disk quota enabling in Linux/Unix in this post. Sometimes we might have low space in on local disk. To avoid this will allocate disk size to Users/Groups by enabling and configuring quota in /home directory.

As a first step we should enable quota in Filesystem.

by editing and adding usrquota and grpquota in home directory entry at /etc/fstab file will enable quota.

 

[root@server ~]# vi /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Fri Nov 24 17:31:25 2017
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/rhel-root / xfs defaults 0 0
UUID=2f2c635e-e5fb-4c81-823a-855a334ca04c /boot xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/rhel-swap swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/rootvg/lv_tmp1 /home xfs defaults,usrquota,grpquota 0 0

save and exit from the file.

Now remount the filesystem using below command.

[root@server ~]# mount -o remount /home

Then check whether the quota has been enabled or not in /home mountpoint.

[root@server ~]# mount | grep /home
 /dev/mapper/rootvg-lv_tmp1 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,quota,usrquota,grpquota,data=ordered)

Creating database using below command

[root@server ~]# quotacheck -cugv /home

C:     Key to create new quota file

U:     User quota

G:     Group quota

V:     Verbose mode

And now turn on the quota in /home directory using below command

[root@server ~]# quotaon /home

Now will assign quota using edquota command to User/Group

Syntax to create quota on user:

#edquota -u <username>

Syntax to create quota on group:

#edquota -g <groupname>

Will see a example of creating quota on user called abu

[root@server ~]# edquota -u abu

Now the above command will open quota file like below

Disk quotas for user abu (uid 1001):
 Filesystem                 blocks soft hard inodes soft hard
 /dev/mapper/rootvg-lv_tmp1    0   5000 6000   0      0    0

Above data has two quota limits. One is based on blocks and another one based on inode.

For block usage:

Soft:    Soft limit will warn the user if the user exceeds the limit. But, user allowed to write data in home directory till reaching the hard limit. In above example, we have provided 5000KB(nearby 5MB)

hard:    Hard limit will not allow user to write data in home directory once reached hard limit. In above example, we have provided 6000KB(6MB) as hard limit.

Will login and try to create 8MB of file using dd command to check the quota on user.

[root@server ~]# su abu
[abu@server ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bgfile bs=1M count=8
dm-3: warning, user block quota exceeded.
dm-3: write failed, user block limit reached.
dd: error writing ‘bgfile’: Disk quota exceeded
6+0 records in
5+0 records out
6127616 bytes (6.1 MB) copied, 0.00498719 s, 1.2 GB/s

Command to display report on user quota:

[root@server ~]# repquota -as
*** Report for user quotas on device /dev/mapper/rootvg-lv_tmp1
Block grace time: 7days; Inode grace time: 7days
 Space limits File limits
User used soft hard grace used soft hard grace
----------------------------------------------------------------------
root -- 20K 0K 0K 2 0 0
abu +- 6000K 5000K 6000K 6days 6 0 0

Will configure grace period for the user quota. Once grace period has been reached than the soft limit will be come hard limit.

Command to create grace period:

[root@server ~]# edquota -t

Grace period before enforcing soft limits for users:
Time units may be: days, hours, minutes, or seconds
 Filesystem Block grace period Inode grace period
 /dev/mapper/rootvg-lv_tmp1 7days 7days

Grace period also has two types which based on blocks and inodes.

 

Thanks for reading this post.

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