Quota Tutorial

In this series, we will walk you though enabling quota support within Linux.  Quotas are important as a system administrator because they allow us to limit (by user or group) the number of inodes and/or blocks a user/group can use on a particular file system.

Blocks in the Linux world are a measurement of 1K increments.  Every file system has a finite number of blocks, better know as free space.  Once a file system runs out of blocks (free space), the file system can not be written to further until free blocks are made available.  One can easily examine the number of free/used blocks on a file system with the df command (see example output below.)  Enabling a block quota can ensure that any given user/group does not consume all the available free disk space.

For those not familiar with the term inode or index node, they provide the ext3 file system with attribute values such as:

• File type (executable, block, special etc)
• Ower
• Group
• Permisions (read, write, executable)
• File size
• File access information (modification time, last access time, creation time etc.)
• Number of links (soft or hard)
• Extended attributes
• Access Control List information (ACL)

Every file on an ext3 file system has a inode, and just like disk space, you can run out of inodes.  You can use the command df -i to inspect your free inode count (see below), but once the number of free inodes reaches 0, you will no longer be able to create new files on a file system.  Enabling a inode quota will provide you with a means to limit the number of inodes a user/group can create.  This has a direct correlation with the number of files the user/group will be able to create but can ensure that any one given user/group doesn't accidentally (or on purpose) use all the free indoes on the file system.

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