We can able restrict Disk space once we enable disk quota which alerts a sysadmin before a user takes too much disk space or a partition becomes full.Quotas can only be created for partitions.Quota is of two types, user and group.If we enable quota of 1 MB is set for the partition /home, then every directory under /home or every user on the system, since each directory in /home represents an user, can use a max of 1 MB.
Follow below steps to enable disk quota:
Step 1: First of all Enable disk quota at the partition level by editing /etc/fstab file. Just edit the below line in the file as below:
/dev/sde1 /home ext4 defaults,usrjquota=aquota.user,jqfmt=vfsv0 1 2
Step 2: Remount the /home partition.
# umount /home # mount /home
or
# mount -o remount /home
Step 3: scan /home and enable quota on it.
quotacheck -vcug /home
In some cases you may encounter below error.
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile /home/aquota.user.new: Permission denied
Hence to avoid above error you need to disable SELINUX . Please follow this procedure for disabling SELINUX.
Once you ran quotacheck command successfully as a result “aquota.user” file gets created under /home partition.
[root@rhel1 home]# ls -l total 24 -rw-------. 1 root root 6144 Jan 1 16:52 aquota.user
Step 4: Turn on quota.
[root@rhel1 home]# quotaon -v /home /dev/sde1 [/home]: user quotas turned on
Step 5: To check if quota is on or not.
[root@rhel1 foo]# repquota -a *** Report for user quotas on device /dev/sde1 Block grace time: 7days; Inode grace time: 7days Block limits File limits User used soft hard grace used soft hard grace ---------------------------------------------------------------------- root -- 20 0 0 3 0 0 foo -- 4 0 0 4 0 0
To Implement the quota follow below procedure:
Step 1: To edit quota for a user “foo”
[root@rhel1 ~]# edquota -u foo
The above command opens editor window as below where you can change values as per your need.
In the above output:
1st column: Name of the disk or filesystem where quota is turned on 2nd column: Describes current blocks is in use. 3rd column: Soft limit on the File-system. 4th column: Hard limit on the File-system. 5th column: shows how many inodes the user is currently using. 6th and 7th column: are used to set the soft and hard inode limits for the user on the file system.
Step 2: To edit grace period for user:
[root@rhel1 ~]# edquota -t
This also opens one editor window as below:
Step 3: To copy a quota setting of one user to another user
[root@rhel1 ~]# edquota -p foo bar
This will apply foo’s settings to the user “bar”
So this how we can enable disk quota in Linux.