Comment by Joker_vD
13 hours ago
Ah, I see. Our admins typically understood that users were being given disk quotas precisely so that they could use that disk space, but that's probably not a universal stance.
13 hours ago
Ah, I see. Our admins typically understood that users were being given disk quotas precisely so that they could use that disk space, but that's probably not a universal stance.
Sometimes you aren't really "the owner". For one example I was admining my group's server in grad school. I wanted to add quotas (we already had zfs) because people were abusing home directories but my advisor and a few members were very against it because I was "over complicating things". Their worry about me wasting time (20 minutes for all machines...) resulted in hours of yelling at people over the years. All because, surprise, a small number of people can't follow instructions and abuse systems, ruining it for everyone.
Another frequent problem we had was people using the systems while others were. They wouldn't check the machine's status. And of course you can guess that I wasn't allowed to add a scheduler.
A lot of groups do things in janky ways. Often not because they don't know any better but because leadership doesn't and is assertive
It's really not.
Quotas mean "more than this is clearly too much" not "please use this space".
In good times nobody minds, but in bad times when you just can't extend the drive you have to tell people off. Part of the job of making sure the system can continue to work for what you need it, under _real_ constraints.
You may have to delete stuff, you may have to shut the server down to save power. You may have to limit clock speeds. It depends on the environment and "it really should work because it should be covered by next day on site warranty and you could download more ram" often doesn't apply.
> Quotas mean "more than this is clearly too much" not "please use this space".
Ah, memories of Uni, back when storage was fairly expensive, where we had both hard and soft quotas. The soft quota would allow for temporary growth of build artefacts and things¹ but you would get stern emails if you were over your soft quota for 24 hours, and if you persisted without good reason³ your hard quota would be reduced so you effectively have no soft quota any more.
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[1] some machines had no local storage that the user could touch so putting them there was not always possible, some people on Windows machines had local storage but didn't have the relevant tools locally so were actually running things on the shared server(s)² instead of that just being a storage resource
[2] via telnet/rsh/rlogin: yes, I am that old… SSH was a thing by that point, though OpenSSH wasn't, and I was using it where available, but the use of older plain-text protocols was still far far more common
[3] it wasn't actually difficult to justify a quota extension for project work, in fact people enrolled on certain modules got higher quotas automatically
> Ah, memories of Uni, back when storage was fairly expensive, where we had both hard and soft quotas.
Don't worry, disk got expensive again. Disks are usually at least 2X more expensive than a year ago currently. Sometimes 3X more.
3 replies →
> Quotas mean "more than this is clearly too much" not "please use this space".
super tangential, but makes me think I never realised that "quota" can either be a lower or an upper bound depending on context
Back in the day, because the architecture was shared memory and cooperative multitasking, this is how MacOS applications declared their memory constraints.
Apps had a (recommended and then user-configurable) "Minimum memory" and "Preferred memory." The app would not launch if the OS couldn't give it the minimum. It would then give the app up to the preferred amount, if available, exclusively... This was in the era before virtual memory and paging, so there was no easy way to share memory across an application boundary.
This mean that savvy users with high-resource tasks knew you had to launch your apps in a certain order to get the architecture into the configuration to do their work.
> Quotas mean "more than this is clearly too much" not "please use this space".
Probably why both soft and hard limits were developed.
This is a fascinatingly "pets" approach to admin; it's been ages since I've been somewhere that used this approach. I've been in the "cattle fields" for decades now.
In my ecosystem, developers don't have time to glad-hand like this; if there are issues with DEV_NODE_CFG_1_29875, we might talk about it over Slack (because I'm the first one to know there's a problem as the end-user), and if we can't sort it out they'll give me some time to backup, blank the whole machine, and I get a brand-new image of DEV_NODE_CFG_1_29875.
I can't even tell you off the top of my head what territory the physical machine is running in or whether it's the only dev-node on that hardware.
(Broadly speaking, I think Microsoft is assuming cattle ecosystems; they're not openly-hostile to pets per se, but they have a strict ranking of the priorities because the "cattle ranches," as it were, bring in more money).
I had it seen on servers that were typically reserved for the team but there was no official booking system for those machines. When you start using the machine you would typically put some note to make sure somebody else does not overrun your long-running tests or performance measurements.