Has anyone tried the quota system?

[Piercarlo Grandi]

In article <9340 at brazos.Rice.edu> celvin at EE.Surrey.Ac.UK (Chris Elvin) writes:

	[ ... about quota checking ... ]

   I have 10 file servers with a total in execess of 8Gbytes of cross
   mounted disk on some 30 partitions.  Logging in may take several
   minutes on a heavily loaded or slow machine.

Having too many mount points is really an exaggeration. I think that one
mount point per server is all that is needed. Each server should have a
directory with its name under which it mounts all filesystems that it must
export. The resulting tree is like:

		/server1/fs0/...
		/server1/fs1/...
		/server2/fsA/...
		/server3/fsX/...
		/server3/fsY/...
		/server3/fsZ/...

Where if you are on server1 you just mount your devices onto fs0 and fs1,
whereas you NFS mount the entire /server2 and /server3 from the other
servers.

This organization reduces dramatically the number of mounted filesystems,
which is *good* for many reasons (and helps prevent getcwd() lockups on
pre-4.1 systems, especially if combined with a shadow mount tree of
symbolic links). Hey, mount points *cost*.

Naturally the best solution is simply :-) to get rid of NFS altogether,
and alternatives are belatedly becoming available (Mach AFS Coda Sprite
...).

As to disabling quota reporting at login instead, not too difficult;
several alternatives come to mind:

a) Rename /usr/ucb/quota to e.g. /usr/ucb/quotas
b) Patch the /bin/login binary
c) Get one of many free login.c sources
d) Mount locally with the noquota option, the server checks.

I think easiest is a). d) is more 'elegant'...

Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi          | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth       | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK| INET: pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk