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Comments and suggestions concerning this book should be mailed to gmourani@videotron.ca © Copyright 1999-2000 Gerhard Mourani and Open Network Architecture ® 219 Set Quota on your Linux system Overview Quota is a system administration tools for monitoring and limiting users' and/or groups' disk usage, per file system. Two features of disk storage with “quota” are available to set limits: the first is the number of inodes (number of files) a user or a group of users may possess and the second is the number of disk blocks (number of space  in kilobytes) that may be allocated to a user or a group of users. With quota, the users are forced by the system administrator to not consume unlimited disk space on a system. This program is handled on per user, per file system basis and must be set for each file system separately. Build a kernel with Quota support The first thing you need to do is ensure that your kernel has been built with Quota support enabled. In the 2.2.14 kernel version you need ensure that you have answered  Y to the following questions: Filesystems Quota support (CONFIG_QUOTA) [N/y/?] Y NOTE: If you are follow the Linux Kernel chapter on this book and are recompiled your kernel, the options “Quota support” show above is already set. Modify the “/etc/fstab” file The “/etc/fstab” file contains information about the various file systems installed on your Linux server. Quota must be enabling in the fstab file before you can use it. Since Quota must be set for each file system separately and because in fstab file, each file system is described on a separate line, quota must be set on each of the separate line in the fstab you want to enable quota support. With the program quota, depending of your intentions, needs, etc, you can enable quota only for users, group or both (user and group). For all examples bellow we use the “/home” directory on the “/dev/sda6” partition and shows you the three possibilities. Possibility 1: · To enable user quota support on a specific file system, edit your fstab file (vi /etc/fstab) and add the "usrquota" option to the fourth field after the word "defaults" or any other options you may have set for this specific file system. As an example change: /dev/sda6               /home                   ext2    defaults        1 2 (as an example: the word “defaults”) /dev/sda6               /home                   ext2    nosuid,nodev    1 2 (as an example: any other options you have set) To read: /dev/sda6               /home                   ext2    defaults,usrquota       1 2 /dev/sda6               /home                   ext2    nosuid,nodev, usrquota   1 2 Possibility 2: