Problem with quotas and NFS (ULTRIX -> RISC/os)

[Steven Winikoff]

My environment is as follows:

   MIPS M-120/5 under RISC/os 4.01, mounting a file system which
   is exported from a DECsystem 5500 under ULTRIX 4.1.

   The file system has quotas established on the ULTRIX side.

Users on the MIPS, whose home directories are on the NFS-mounted
file system, are generally able to work normally.  However, *some*
users (and I haven't been able to establish anything in common
about the ones in question) experience a complete inability to
write any files.

In fact, any file these unfortunate people attempt to write ends up
at zero length.  Worse, any existing file they attemp to rewrite (as
in :wq in vi, for example) is truncated to zero length.  Clearly this
is not acceptable behaviour!

The question, of course, is what's going on?  Are ULTRIX quotas simply
not supported in an NFS environment?  Is there something I have to do
on the RISC/os (MIPS) side?

Note that both of the two users who have reported this problem to me
were well below their quota at the time.

The only workaround I've found is to set the quota to zero (ie
unlimited) for the affected users.

I could just turn quotas off altogether, but I need them in place.
(We have a 1-Gb disk fully allotted to these users.  Half of it is
currently used, and ~85% of it is currently committed in established
quotas.  New users are being added all the time.  I desperately need
a way to prevent a few people from making the system unusable for
everyone else.)

Help!!!

Any assistance will be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

- Steven

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Winikoff                                 smw at alcor.concordia.ca
Software Analyst
Dept. of Computing Services
Concordia University                            voice: (514) 848-7619
Montreal, Quebec, Canada                               (10:00-18:00 EST)