Quota

Disk Quotas

Background: All systems have limited disk space and in order to fairly distribute the resource between users, we enforce quotas. Quotas on Atlas and Students are generally setup as followed.

Each user has:

/home - 20MB of space, this holds saved email files, general files and html files.
/var/mail - 2MB of space this holds your incoming email (your inbox)
some users who use the cgi-bin have a quota /local/apache/cgi-bin - 2MB

If you go over the prescribed quota and use resources over what you have been assigned, the server will respond with "You are over quota, delete files...." or something similar when you try to save a file.

How to solve the problem:

At the Atlas or KSUWeb unix prompt, type quota -v

The system will respond something similar to:

quota -v username
Disk quotas for username (uid XXXXX):

Filesystem	Usage	Quota	Limit	Timeleft	Files	Quota	Limit	Timeleft
/var/mail	2496	2000	2500	EXPIRED	1	0	0
/home	3762	20000	25000		76	0	0
/local/apache/cgi-bin	0	2000	2500		18	0	0

This is a printout of a user which is over quota on /var/mail. If you look you will see that usage is higher than quota. The system will at this point start counting down from 7 days until the user will be locked out of the account. When the timeleft is showing EXPIRED, the account will be locked.

Once you have located which filesystem you are over quota, you need to find the files which you can spare to get back under quota and operational again. For this it is handy to use ls -alt (1) and du -h (2). ls -alt will show all files with the newest file displayed first and the du -h will display how much space each file take on the disk of the system. Once you have located the files you want to remove to get under quota, use the rm command (3) to remove them. 'rm' filename will remove the file from the disk. Once you have removed files to allocate space you can re-run quota -v to check that you are under quota again.

If you are in the situation of not being able to spare any of the files in your directories, then you have more elaborate ways of handling the problem by using tar archives (4) and compressing utilities like gzip (5) or gunzip (6). Like WinZip, these utilities will organize and compress your files for storage.

Note:

'ls' is the list command to list files inside a directory. -alt are switches to change formatting for the list command -a is all files -l is long listing -t is the newest creation listed first depending on timestamp on file. There are more switches which can be used. Check 'man ls' to get the scoop.

'du' is the disk usage command to display how much space each file takes up. -h is for display in human readable form with M for Megabyte. There are more switches which can be used. Refer to 'man du' to get the scoop.

'rm' is the remove command to remove files. 'rm' filename will remove the named file from the disk. Please note, rm is irreversible. Refer to man rm.

'tar' refer to 'man tar' for usage

gzip refer to 'man gzip' for usage

gunzip refer to 'man gunzip' for usage