[lug] Reserving part of a file system -- quotas or something else

[David L. Willson]

It sounds an awful lot like you're looking for a good, old-fashioned partition. LVM is just gravy. Do you need resizing or not? If you do, go LVM. If you don't, just make a partition.

Create the partition
Mount it somewhere out of the way
Create a few appropriately named and permission-ed folders. I might suggest a mode of 2770 or 2775.
Create symlinks in intuitively obvious locations.

autofs might dovetail nicely here...

David L. Willson
Trainer, Engineer, Enthusiast
MCT MSCE Network+ A+ Linux+ LPIC-1 NovellCLA UbuntuCP
tel://720.333.LANS

----- "Vince Dean" <vincedean at frii.com> wrote:

> I have a system on which I would like to reserve a certain amount of
> disk space for certain high-priority jobs, allowing all the users to
> fight over the rest.  The machine runs a variety of research, ad-hoc
> programs, alongside some high-priority production jobs.
> 
> Quotas sound attractive, but it's not obvious how to use them for
> this
> purpose.  I could assign a quota to each user, but that would be far
> more specific than I need.  I want either to reserve X Tbytes for one
> use , or else limit the sum of all the other uses to Y Tbytes. I
> don't
> need to manage quotas for each user.
> 
> One possibility would be to reserve an entire RAID, or an entire file
> system for the production jobs.  This would work, but would limit our
> future flexibility.
> 
> We have suggested using logical volume management to create the
> partitions and to re-size them if necessary.  The system
> administrator
> likes to use LVM for the initial setup of a system, but he is
> reluctant
> to resize a logical volume, for fear of catastrophic data loss.  Is
> that
> a reasonable fear?
> 
> Any suggestions?  Assigning entire machines or RAIDs to the
> production
> jobs would certainly solve the problem, and might
> be a better use of our time and money, but I would like to explore
> other
> options.  Am I overlooking an easy solution?
> 
> Thanks,
> Vince Dean
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> Join us on IRC: irc.hackingsociety.org port=6667
> channel=#hackingsociety