Our users often request a shared disk space to use with a group of users in order to exchange or work on some files. To be able to also utilize quota management we create a new user account (which is quota controlled) and give access to that user's home from the group of users. I actually do not like this approach. How can we build a flexible solution which will allow us to give some amount of space to some users on demand with quota control enabled?
(One solution I think of is making heavy use of LVM in order to create a new partition (lv) for each group but I am not sure how it will scale.)
Best Answer
I'm a fan of "soft-quotas". Hard quota and disk limits can impair ability to work, if they happen to actually need 30 G of space one day to do some large project, let's say. At my company we have a very simple script which grabs all the users from AD, SMB mounts their home directories and does size calculation. Attached to this script is a standard quota limit (2G for us), as well as an exceptions list.
If they violate the quota they, along with management, receive an E-Mail notification of the size of their directory, as well as their quota.
Doesn't work for every environment, or every scale, but it beats impairing productivity when you have a hard quota limit.