How to enable quota on OpenSuse

Quota allows System Administrator to specify limits on two aspects of disk storage: the number of inodes a user or a group of users may possess; and the number of disk blocks that may be allocated to a user or a group of users.

The idea behind quota is that users are forced to stay under their disk consumption limit, taking away their ability to consume unlimited disk space on a system. Quota is handled on a per user, per file system basis. If there is more than one file system which a user is expected to create files, then quota must be set for each file system separately.

1: To install quota: # yast2 -i quota

2: Edit /etc/fstab and add usrquota,grpquota to the mountpoints of the filesystem to which you want to enable quota (example /disk below)

# vi /etc/fstab
/dev/sda6            /disk                ext3       defaults,noatime,usrquota,grpquota    0 0

3) Now go (cd) to the mount point (/disk) and create the quota files

# touch /aquota.user /aquota.group
# chmod 600 /aquota.*

4) Remount the partition: # mount -o remount /disk

5) Run the following command to initialize the quota on the /disk filesystem

# quotacheck -avugm
# quotaon -avug

The -a switch tells quotacheck to perform the check on all filesystems. The -u and -g switches tell it to check for user and group quotas. Using the -m switch means the filesystem will not be remounted as read-only.

The first time you run the quotacheck command, it will throw up several warnings because the filesystem had not been checked before.

quotacheck: Scanning /dev/sda6 [/disk] done                                                          
quotacheck: Cannot stat old user quota file: No such file or directory
quotacheck: Cannot stat old group quota file: No such file or directory
quotacheck: Cannot stat old user quota file: No such file or directory
quotacheck: Cannot stat old group quota file: No such file or directory
quotacheck: Checked 20 directories and 661 files  
quotacheck: Old file not found.                                                        
quotacheck: Old file not found.

6) Your filesystems are now set up to use disk quotas. To turn them on, use the quotaon command:

# quotaon -augv
/dev/sda6 [/disk]: group quotas turned on
/dev/sda6 [/disk]: user quotas turned on

Once quotas are enabled, you can use the edquota command to limit the disk space available to users. The edquota -u username command will open up a text editor wherein you can specify the soft and hard inodes and blocks limits for a particular user. The edquota -g command can similarly be used to edit group quotas.