5.9.7.3. Managing Disk Quotas

There is little actual management required to support disk quotas under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Essentially, all that is required is:
  • Generating disk usage reports at regular intervals (and following up with users that seem to be having trouble effectively managing their allocated disk space)
  • Making sure that the disk quotas remain accurate
Creating a disk usage report entails running the repquota utility program. Using the command repquota /home produces this output: 
 *** Report for user quotas on device /dev/md3 Block grace time: 7days; Inode grace time: 7days Block limits File limits User used soft hard grace used soft hard grace ---------------------------------------------------------------------- root -- 32836 0 0 4 0 0 matt -- 6618000 6900000 7000000 17397 0 0
More information about repquota can be found in the System Administrators Guide, in the chapter on disk quotas.
Whenever a file system is not unmounted cleanly (due to a system crash, for example), it is necessary to run quotacheck. However, many system administrators recommend running quotacheck on a regular basis, even if the system has not crashed.
The process is similar to the initial use of quotacheck when enabling disk quotas.
Here is an example quotacheck command: 
quotacheck -avug
The easiest way to run quotacheck on a regular basis is to use cron. Most system administrators run quotacheck once a week, though there may be valid reasons to pick a longer or shorter interval, depending on your specific conditions.