Disk Quotas

Strangely enough, for someone who complains so much about storage space, I've never setup disk quotas in Linux.

I guess it's because I've never had a large installed user base in Linux, and didn't feel the need to provide hard limits for the users. I would occasionally run "du -h -s *" in the volume root and send a reminder to people with unnecessarily large directories, but never any mandatory requirement.

I believe that's going to change. I've been thinking about it, and since our space is finite, there's no reason that the user home directories should be allowed to inexorably fill up the entire partition. To make sure it doesn't happen, I'll use disk quotas.

Nikesh Jauhari over at Linux Poison wrote a quick little introduction to disk quotas in Linux. It's about the simplest explanation I've seen, and I like simple. For the Windows reliant, Microsoft published an article entitled Managing Disk Quotas in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, which should cover most of the installs out there.

Anyone else been looking at this for a while? And while I'm asking, how much storage is enough storage for your users?