Windows – Weird used/free space view of network drives with Samba and XFS

quotasambawindowsxfs

I'm using XFS project quotas to offer some private and limited disk space to my users, running Windows. It works pretty well, as the users can't exceed the quota like expected. However, the Samba's reported free/used disk space is a bit crazy. In "My computer", when the drive is just highlighted, the free space reported is the total amount of space of the server drive, and the used space is the amount of the quota. In the "Properties" of the network drive, it's worse, the used space information is a bunch of special characters and bytes values.

How can I set Samba up to send correct values to the Windows built-in SMB client?

Server: Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS with the default and latest packaged Samba version

Clients: Windows XP / Windows 7

Thanks.

Best Answer

It is possible to have quota information on xfs with samba, but you need to have the xfs quota libraries installed when you compile samba.

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For Samba to support quotas, there must be few preconditions met: Samba must be compiled with quota support, the FS being shared must support quotas and have the quotas enabled.

To turn on quotas you need to:

Add usrjquota=aquota.user,jqfmt=vfsv0 to mount options in /etc/fstab and create a aquota.user file in root directory of file system (if it's a /home FS, you can create it using touch /home/aquota.user.
Re-calculate current disk usage with
```
quotacheck -vguma
```

To set the quotas you may use either quotactl, quota and similar Linux tools or connect to the share as root (no other user will work, including the ones defined in admin users) and use the windows share properties to change quotas.

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Lastly, it would be nice to get an idea of what drive size you use for c:\ for whatever version of Windows you use.

Server 2003: We use 15GB C: drives for these now. We used to use 10GB ones, but the patch-dirs ate us out of house and home. We're not spinning up many of these any more, but if we do, 15GB is it.

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Best Answer

Related Solutions

Samba – How to set up disk quotas on a remote server in a Samba environment

Windows – Cleaning up a server’s C:\ drive. All known ways

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