The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

Hard Quota Limits

Quotas are a fact of computing life. If you have an ECN account you have a quota.

What I want to emphasize in this article is that you should pay attention to how long you have been over quota. Once you have been over your quota for 3 days, your hard quota limit becomes the same as your soft quota limit. This situation is something that you should avoid if at all possible! You CAN NOT WRITE files when you have reached your HARD quota limit. If you are editing a file, then do not try to write it in your directory! Also, do NOT try to compress files! Because you cannot write to the disk, instead of compressing the file, the computer will create a zero length file.Z!! See the example below,

   % compress *
   % ls -ls
   total 0                                  <---------- OH NO!!!
    0 -rw-r--r--  1 login  0 Feb 8 17:24 fig.Z
    0 -rw-r--r--  1 login  0 Apr 1 15:32 plot.Z
      etc.

Instead, look for a large file that can be removed (like "core"), or mail your site specialist asking for help. (See "help ecnnews/Sites".) The following plot tracks example quota usage with 500K soft quota and 1000K hard quota.

                        Graph Shown Here

Note that after 4 days, usage (dotted line) was lower than the soft quota limit (500K), and the hard limit (1000k) was reset.

If you want to read more about quota, you can look at the "Quota Quandry" article in the May 1989 No Name Newsletter. To do that, you type: "help ecnnews" and type the number for the choices you desire. In this example you would type "7" for "7: NEWSLETTERS" followed by "8" for "8: 89.May."

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