Call for new script

Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 09:37:13 -0300 (ADT)
From: "David L. Potter" <potter@chebucto.ns.ca>
To: ccn-tech@chebucto.ns.ca
cc: "deveau, leo j. -- leo j. deveau" <ljdeveau@glinx.com>, editors@chebucto.ns.ca
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Return-Path: <editors-mml-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>

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Before we get too involved in 'solving' this pressing question,...

If you send mail to someone who is over-quota in mail you're simply 
making the problem worse... 

Dial-in text users already get the appropriate messages so anything 
else you do with respect to their accounts is probably unnecessary and as 
noted above in danger of making the problem worse...

PPP users typically don't need to be notified about mail quota problems 
because they download their mail and it does not stay on our system...

Individual PPP users find about home quota problems when they try to FTP 
files in and the write fails... and they can deal with it then... we make 
no undertaking that indivdual users can run cgi-scripts that might add 
data/files to their file area, 

So the only reason to do this is to justify having IP's under hard Unix 
quotas particularly in the home directory area which I still think is 
essentially wrong-headed... 

We promote the availability of IP-CGI as a service for our information 
provider accounts... so we have some responsibility to ensure that it works, 
and that they are not unpleasantly surprised to discover that their data 
collection stopped a week ago because they went over a hard quota and the 
script failed without warning...

In all the discussion about quotas for IP's I've heard no mention about 
the number of files permitted... is the proposal simply to pick some 
arbitrary number out of the air and then charge an IP who has a lot of 
small files and goes over the file quota limit, or has this been even 
thought about...  

---

Even back when hard drives were _VERY_, _VERY_ expensive we had no problem 
providing an Information Provider with all of the disk space they could 
use... 

I can accept that unlimited disk space for a user/IP represents a black 
hole (empty entry) in the list of services and this would confuse clients 
and staff equally.... But even if we associate some nominal disk storage 
with a particular level of service there are several ways of dealing with 
IP's that exceed that threashold without imposing hard unix limits. 
I'm still not aware of any compelling reason to focus our attention on 
making sure that an IP uses not one bit nor byte more than their 
allotment...

We have speed limits on the highway, human safety is in involved, however it 
wouldn't make sense to configure cars to explode if they go over the speed 
limit in an effort to protect everyone else...

While the lack of a hard quota may appear to be a significant problem at 
the bean-counting level, at the technical level we always have had lots of 
disk space available and from a pure technical perspective this is quite 
low priority... I find it hard to attribute any significant level of 
priority to this at all. We'd be better off starting to undo the mess that 
putting IP's in the 'home' tree is creating. 

BTW quota -q is not supported under Solaris... ;-)

david potter


On Wed, 3 May 2000, Chris Watt wrote:

> At 10:54 PM 5/2/00 -0300, Andrew D. Wright wrote:
> >	The idea is to write a script that checks all /home/ directory
> >quotas against what they should have, then mail the account when they go
> >over quota with a little message telling them what they can do to remedy
> >the situation. 
> 
> Would something as simple as
> 
> if quota -q $homedir $username; then
> 	sendmail -foffice@chebucto.ns.ca $useraddress < overquota.txt
> fi
> if quota -q /var/spool/mail $username; then
> 	sendmail -foffice@chebucto.ns.ca $useraddress < overmailquota.txt
> fi
> 
> 
> 
> work? AFAIK there is no point in attempting to distinguish between over
> hard-quota and over soft-quota, since we cannot deliver to someone over
> hard-quota anyway, right?
> 
> Also, am I correct in thinking that
> echo `basename $homedir` @chebucto.ns.ca
> is going to be the right e-mail address? If so it could just run in a for
> loop on /home/* without any need for extra tables I would expect (failing
> that, a two column translation table with code to default to the address
> generated from the home dir would be fairly easy to set up.
> 
> It may be the case that some of this is broken under Solaris, but it works
> in Linux.
> --
> 
> Who is this General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
> 

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