A strange request for our first “AskAFP”: I’m interested in knowing what people want to do with disk quotas on OSXS for AD users.
I’m coming up with a few scripts that should automate this whole process. I’m curious to know if people want to enforce quotas on a group basis, or just for users. Also, are you enforcing quotas for all of your AD users, or just a specific group of them. Anything else you want to do with quotas?
BTW, if you know Cocoa and are looking for a project that deals with server, give me a shout.
Joel
by 
I have been struggling with quotas on OSXS. The problem I have encountered
is through scripting new accounts and using the edquota -p option to set up
a quota for an account based on a "prototype" user. Any quotas that I build
using the form ‘edquota -p protouser newuser’ work for a short while, but
within a day (and usually only a couple of hours) the quota is reset back to
zero (no quota) for no apparent reason. If I manually edit the user’s quota
with the edquota command (edquota newuser) it works fine. Also, any user
that I create with the -p option shows up in repquota -a with the name of the
prototype user rather than the real user’s ID.
This is a nasty bug that prevents me from batching a lot of new users – right
now I have to manually set each user’s quota. If anyone knows of a way
around this bug or another way to script user quotas I’d love to hear about it.
I’ve been tyring to get Webmin (www.webmin.com) to work with limited
success. I was amazed that it did recognize all the AD users and groups!
Setting soft quotas appears to stick but hard quotas do not stick and they
definitely are not enforced. After setting the Hard quota for a user, when that
user logs in, the hard quota gets set back to "unlimited" so I have no idea if
this is an Apple thing, a Unix thing or a webmin thing. You also have to
guess at how many Blocks are in a Megabyte. I approximated it to 1 block
per KB. After some accidental discoveries it seems that I had to manually edit
the grace period in /usr/include/sys/quota.h from the default 7 days to the 1
day that we need – I still don’t know if this will actually work but we’ll see.
I’ve sent numerous emails to the developer of webmin and I’m guessing he’s
never actually used a mac before…. which i guess is fair because my
knowledge of the CLI quota commands is nearly non-existent too. This does
seem like a really great tool and I would really love to use Webmin to its
fullest potential but I think there needs to be a bit of more MacOSX&UNIX
educated communication with the guys at webmin. I do suggest that if you
have the means, do install it and tinker with it. You do need to have the OSX
Dev Kit installed in order for many modules to work at all.
oh… I guess to answer the question put forth:
The vast majority of our students need to be set to 100MB quota – grace
period of 24 hours – with an absolute hard limit of 200MB. There is a smaller
number of upperclass students who need a quota of 200MB – grace period of
24 hours- and a hard limit of 300MB. Our faculty and staff aren’t to be
limited at all but this is not set in stone. I would like to set a quota to apply
to all the users in a particular group BUT not have group quotas. I would also
like to be able to make exceptions if I wish. Something that does not require
intimate knowledge of all the commandline switches and parameters etc…
Joel,
I am totally looking for a Cocoa OS X server project let me know if you still
have some ideas.
Thanks
Zach
Hello Joel,
If you need more help with the Cocoa part, I’ll be happy to work on this.
All The Best,
Fabio