cuccia@yak.sybase.com (Nick Cuccia) (07/08/89)
In article <4893@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <18414@mimsy.UUCP>, chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: >> The restriction is not bogus, because the system supports disk quotas. > >This assume that disk quotas are not bogus in a production environment. >That is, outside a university... Think about two or more administrative groups divvying up a large disk partition. (The real solution, of course, is to buy more disks (not always practical from a financial point-of-view) or to repartition the existing disk (not always practical, due to either limitations caused by different vendors or the downtime required to repartition the existing disk). But I digress...). Under such a system, quotas (or, something almost like, but not exactly like the BSD or Sun quotas mechanisms) provide the answer. The problem that I have with the current quotas implementations is that they're too limited in scope. For the problem above, the current implementations are useful--as long as the members of each group are mutually exclusive (if your groups are beancounters and developers, then that assumption is probably valid). If, however, you have the more common situation of users being members of multiple groups (three groups working on the same application suite: one on front ends, another on servers and back ends, and the other on networking support. While the first two groups may have a fairly small intersecting set with each other, they'd each have quite a bit of intersection with the third), then you fall into the nightmare of adjusting a user in the intersecting set's quotas so that his quota doesn't cause any of his groups' quotas to be exceeded. The fix is conceptually simple: allow for quota-by-group, as well as quota-by- user. --Nick =============================================================================== Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb...--Batman Nick Cuccia System Admin/Postmaster, Sybase, Incorporated cuccia@sybase.com 6475 Christie Av. Emeryville, CA 94608 {sun,lll-tis,pyramid,pacbell}!sybase!cuccia +1 415 596-3500 ===============================================================================