Xsan quota from OD

[rstasel]

Hey all,

So, unless I'm missing something completely obvious, it doesn't look like xsan will grab quota info from OD. This is somewhat perplexing and annoying, since I already have quota's set up for home directories that existed pre-san and I want to move them over.

At this point, is there anything left for me but to code up a shell script to plow through the directory, and then apply that quota to xsan using cvadmin?

Thanks!

[soward]

Unfortunately you are not missing anything. A script to set the quota is pretty simple though, and probably best anyway if you have more than a handful of users.

However checking the quota is also problematic, especially if your users aren't CLI-savvy, or like many of mine, are using the storage remotely from windows, web, etc. I wound up writing a C wrapper for cvadmin to get a users quota so it could be used in a variety of ways -- cli, as a web cgi, inside 'dfree' so that the reported disk size of a users home directory is their quota (when mounted via SMB)

[rstasel]

great. Yeah, this script was pretty easy.

Now the odd thing is that, the finder doesn't report quota. We have a 10TB Xsan, with 8.65TB available, and the finder for a user with a quota (hard and soft) set at 4GB reports "8.65TB available".

Of course, if the user tries to copy anything to their home folder and hits the hard limit, the finder chokes and says "you've hit quota", so obviously AFP knows what's going on (otherwise it would report something like "error writing file" or something like that).

Anyone have any ideas? Is this what others are seeing?

And why the hell did Apple still not give Xsan 2 the ability to pull quota info from OD?!? Unless it's there and they just don't talk about it in any of the manuals.

[MattG]

A bit of a copout workaround, but...

Autolaunch the Xsan User Quota app that is found on every node inside of /Applications/Server.

This way, the user refers to that app to get info on their quota.

[rstasel]

these users aren't Xsan nodes... they're accessing the SAN over AFP, so I'm not sure that'll work. =/

[rstasel]

So seemingly, Quotas on an Xsan being reshared via AFP are a very bad thing.

Xsan knows about the quotas, but doesn't really tell anything else.

Example:

SAN is connected to an Intel Xserve, which reshares the volume over AFP. Quotas are set on the SAN, since you can't use normal quotas on the SAN. Connecting to the AFP server with a user that has a quota shows the user has some odd TB available (even though the quota is, say, 4 gig). Writing files on the AFP share until that limit is fine, then you get a "can't write file, you're at quota". Great! Except, the finder still says you have several TB available. So, basically, the finder and the rest of the OS has no idea you're at quota, only the AFP server knows that, but doesn't share that info with the client.

That's all great, except when the AFP server comes crashing down because the client starts flailing wildly trying to write temp files, or spotlight files, or cache files, preferences, etc, only to have the server say "no". But, the finder and OS just keep trying, over and over and over. AFP server slows to a crawl, and all clients are impacted (situation obviously becomes worse when you have multiple users logged in that are all over quota).

This is all with Xsan 1.4.2. Hopefully, because Apple is touting Xsan 2 as a valid storage solution for Home Directories, they will fix these quota issues. But, as it stands now, Xsan 1.x quotas suck for Network Home Directory storage. But, looking at the documentation for Xsan 2, it doesn't look like my initial issue has been addressed (Xsan grabbing quota info from OD). Here's hoping this issue is addressed.

[mrtubz]

I am looking to setup XSan as a shared storage system for large design department.

The seem to be running out of space quite rapidly and need additional 'easy add' storage.

Im looking at porting their home directories onto the SAN and assigning AFP quota's to them on the primary OD server as some users are getting 80GB plus home directories and using all the space.

Question is: Does anyone know if home directory quotas set in OD are correctly enforced under Xsan 2. I know from past experience that they never worked properly under XSan 1.4. Has anyone tried this yet?

I be happy to hear from anyone that has.

[staze]

From what I can see in the documentation, they are not... but, I haven't yet tried. =/ Upgrading to Xsan 2 I think is a summer break project... I would really like to see a point release before I make the plunge.

For what it's worth... an Apple rep did tell me that they wanted to implement pulling Quota info from OD, but he/she wasn't sure if it would make it into 2.0. The only issue I could see would be, which quota would the OD quota be... hard or soft?

I have a pretty easy php script that scrapes the OD for quota info, and then sets the quotas on the Xsan... (it sets the OD quota tot he soft quota, then I have a multiplier that sets the hard quota). I did PHP because I'm more familiar with how do deal with arrays in php than I am in sh.

Doh, apparently I have two accounts on the forums... staze == rstasel. =/

[mrtubz]

Thanks for the info staze, ill keep an eye out for any other posts on this. I really need to use a quota system for the users as they are beginning to have stupidly large homes full of junk.

Ill take a look at the php scripting as you suggested and see how I get on with that.

[staze]

Here's what I have, sanitized (and yeah, I'm sure it could be optimized a bit more, but ultimately, the speed is entirely bottlenecked cvadmin... the creation of all the commands takes only a few seconds)...