# the quota system?



## wonslung (Jun 19, 2009)

i was currious, if i use the quota system in freebsd can i set it on home directories PER user or is it a global setting for all users?

I know i could use ZFS for quotas but i can't use ZFS on this machine.

what i'd like is to set some homes at 10 gb some 25 and some 35


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## mk (Jun 19, 2009)

yes, to enable quota put quota option in kernel and build it.
enable quota on /home and edit as desired user/group.quota file.
keep in mind that size is specified in bytes and no substitution like K M G are possible. there is possability to restrict users on inode use. for more info man -k quota and the handbook.


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## wonslung (Jun 19, 2009)

yah, but i can set it PER user

so i can set one user 25g and one 10g?
i read it in the handbook but it wasn't perfectly clear
thanks


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## phoenix (Jun 19, 2009)

No.  ZFS quotas are per filesystem.  If you want to do "per user" quotas on their home directory, then you need to create a separate ZFS filesystem for each user.  Which works fine, for single-purpose/single-user filesystems.

Once you start getting into shared filesystems, then the user-per-filesystem method breaks down a bit.  For example, you can't have a /home/shared directory, and give user's 10 GB quotas on /home/shared.

This is a known, current "limitation" in ZFS.  I believe they are working on it for a later version, but haven't really been keeping up with quota development.


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## wonslung (Jun 19, 2009)

phoenix said:
			
		

> No.  ZFS quotas are per filesystem.  If you want to do "per user" quotas on their home directory, then you need to create a separate ZFS filesystem for each user.  Which works fine, for single-purpose/single-user filesystems.
> 
> Once you start getting into shared filesystems, then the user-per-filesystem method breaks down a bit.  For example, you can't have a /home/shared directory, and give user's 10 GB quotas on /home/shared.
> 
> This is a known, current "limitation" in ZFS.  I believe they are working on it for a later version, but haven't really been keeping up with quota development.




no, this is for a different system, i have a ufs only system that i will not be running ZFS on, this is for a seedbox server. When we tried ZFS on it it was a disaster...it was just lagged out, not sure why exactly but it worked fine under UFS before.

I did, however, become addicted to using quotas so i needed to understand how to handle them in ufs.


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## mk (Jun 19, 2009)

wonslung said:
			
		

> yah, but i can set it PER user
> 
> so i can set one user 25g and one 10g?
> i read it in the handbook but it wasn't perfectly clear
> thanks



then read the handbook again, read the manpages - take a look at edquota - editing quotas. edquota seeduser will open the quota file for user seeduser in your $EDITOR (by default vi)


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## wonslung (Jun 19, 2009)

mk said:
			
		

> then read the handbook again, read the manpages - take a look at edquota - editing quotas. edquota seeduser will open the quota file for user seeduser in your $EDITOR (by default vi)



yah, i read it again after your post, i had seen where it said to put the stuff in fstab and what not but i didn't originally see how you were supposed to edit it.

i think i get it now. thanks

edit:

i'm currious, is this possible inside a jail? if so how would you go about setting it up?


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