Setting up and Managing Disk Quota's

Disk quota's are very important as they prevent your users from filling up your hard drive, to set-up disk quota's on your /home directory, insure that your /home directory is configured as a separate partition, if it is not then you will need to set up your quota's on your root partition ie /
edit your /etc/fstab file and edit the line for your /home or your / partition and add the usrquota option like so
/dev/hda/ /home ext3 defaults,usrquota 1 2

save your fstab file and then type
mount -a
so that the fstab files changes are read by the kernel

next

type quotacheck -cugm
this will scan the quota file system and is necessary to run first before you can add quota's
c = create files
u = scan user quota's
g= scan group quota's
m= no remount
then to add a quota type the following substitute "username" for the username you want to add the quota for

edquota -u username /home

vi will then open the quota file for that user that looks like this

Disk quotas for user username (uid 500):
Filesystem blocks soft hard inodes soft hard
/dev/hda 707896 0 0 13 0 0

simply edit the file to the settings you want. A soft limit is your warning limit and a hard limit is your never exceed limit. blocks are storage size 1000 blocks is equal to roughly 1MB and you can restrict the user to number of inodes each file uses 1 inode. large amounts of small or empty Files can also fill up a file system , since an empty file still requires an inode so if you set a hard limit on the inodes of say 1000 that means the user will only be able to save a maximum of 1000 files in their home folder even if the files are of 0kb in size.
to limit a user to say 1GB of storage set the hard limit of the blocks to 1000 000 as 1000 blocks is equal to roughly 1MB , so to limit them to 100MB set the hard limit to 100 000 blocks
save the file by typing :wq

to see what quota's have been set and to see the usage by users on all file systems, type repquota -a

a user can also see their own quota statistics by typing quota
or root can type quota -u username

You can also use the setquota command, to set a users quota (instead of edquota)which has the advantage of not using an editor making it ideal for implementing in a script. For example, to set the soft block limit to 100, a hard block limit of 200, a soft inode to 10 and a hard inode to 15 , execute the following command.

setquota -u username100 200 10 15 -a /home