[nflug] fishing for an idea

[Tony E - Jaraeth]

What I canadd is two cents about the standard linux quota pkg.  Assuming you have it installed you should have /etc/warnquota.conf or similar.  That's the file that quota uses to generate warnings and send to a local user account.  Next, you will need to set up a partition with quota support, enabling it by adding "usrquota" to your /etc/fstab, and then using the "quotactl" and "quota" commands along with "setquota" to manage them, or the less intuitive but more like vi approach: edquota.

I don't believe linux quota's will do exactly what you want, but it's a starting place.  I would defnitely suggest reading up on it... It's not something most people get right the first time around ;)

Hth,

Tony E / Jaraeth
Phoenix Wing

-----Original Message-----
From: Cyber Source <peter at thecybersource.com>
Sent: December 02, 2008 9:16 PM
To: nflug at nflug.org
Subject: [nflug] fishing for an idea

Hello All,
  I can remember way back when terabyte drives weren't even dreamed of 
hard drive space was an issue to constantly think about. My first pc did 
not even have a hard drive and my first hard drive was a 20MB, man, what 
would you do with all that space??!!
  Anywho, I can vaguely remember one of the early Linux distro's install 
routine (either mandrake or redhat) would ask about quotas etc.. I think 
I would like to employ a quota limit of such. I thought I would ask the 
very clever folks on this list for an idea, here's what I got.
  I, as a service, run a remote backup system for my clients, wherein I 
have rsync run on their boxen to backup certain data to our systems 
here. It all works great except for a growing problem. One of my clients 
just had a baby and he's going crazy with the huge megapixel pics and 
the gigabyte sized movies. He wants his stuff backed up here and  when 
he just plops a couple of gigabyte file into the locations getting 
backed up, it creates a huge problem, takes way too long, slow upload 
speed on his end, etc..
  So, here's what I would like, just not sure how to implement it. I 
would like to give him a folder and tell him, ok, whatever you place in 
this folder will get backed up remotely. That's easy. Then I what I 
would like to have is a file size limit on the folder, that he could not 
place a file larger than "x" into this folder. That's a little harder. 
In addition to that limitation, I would like it so that he cannot place 
more than a cumulative size "x" of files in any 24 hour period, so I can 
run the backups on them, once their here, rsync is smart enough to know 
what is here and doesnt need to be copied over. That's gonna be kinda tough