Thoughts on Quotas

[Rumko]

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Stathis Kamperis wrote:

> 2010/9/28 Sdävtaker <sdavtaker at gmail.com>:
>> What i tried to sai about history was that user usage should be
>> measured in a different bag than the history that the user usage
>> generated.
>> Sorry if it was not clear, english is not my main language and i use
>> to fail time to time. :-/
>> Damian
>>
> 
> I kind of agree.
> 
> Why "punish" user for something that s/he is not able to control
> directly ? Even more, the user may not be aware of the underlying
> filesystem's technicalities (how it retains history and so on).
> 
> Better come up with something else.
> 
> Best regards,
> Stathis

Not punishing that user means punishing the whole system and everything
depending on that system. And as I said before, it's user's data, so who
should be punished if not the user? The user can always tell the admin that he
does not any history at all or how much history he needs, so it's purely that
user's responsibility ... his data, his rules, his reponsibility.

Worst case scenario ... a server that is a DB and a file server ... one of the
users (or god forbid, all of the users!) start playing around and *poof* you
can say goodbye to everything that depends on that DB (web servers,
accounting, ...). It is not the job of the admin to watch everything a user
does! That's why there are such things as quota systems, file permissions,
chroots, etc. so that you can limit the users to what they are allowed to do
(and bringing down the whole system just because the admin is not 24/7
monitoring the disk usage does not sound enticing).

Also even if everything above is ignored ... what can an admin do when some
user's history is filling up the drive? Delete it(!)? I kinda doubt it (the
least to worry is privacy issues ... what about if that user says there was
some data there that his company needs? Now you are responsible for destroying
other's data as well! - don't know about laws, but this could be something in
the line of damaging foreign IT system if they really depend on that data?).
-- 
Please do not CC me, since I already receive everything from these MLs.

Regards,
Rumko