Conference decwet::advfs_support

    The quota.group and quota.user files are always present in AdvFS.  They
    can not be removed.
    
    The next question is how much space are the files actually taking up. 
    They are "Sparse" files so they don't always consume as much space as
    it might appear.  For example, on my system this is the size of my
    quota files:
    
    % ls -ls /usr/quota*
    32 -rw-r-----   1 root     operator   172032 Apr 11 11:59 /usr/quota.group
    64 -rw-r-----   1 root     operator  2097152 Apr 28 16:30 /usr/quota.user
    
    In this case, quota.group is only using 32K (1/5th of what it appears)
    and quota.user is only using 64K (1/30th of what it appears) of real
    on-disk storage.
    
    Is the customer looking at the -l "end-of-file" or are they looking at
    the -s "space used in 1024-byte units (including indirect blocks)"?
    
    In any event, they can not delete the quota files from an AdvFS file
    set, but as I've pointed out, it may not be as much of an issue as at
    first thought.
    
    					Bob Harris

    Customer never used quota in his system. In /etc/fstab, he mounts all
    of filesystem with "rw" not "rq".  The size of quota.user is 2GB not 
    2MB (sorry for wrong info. in last note). If he did not use the quota,
    how can I delete that file.
    
    Thanks in your help,
    
    Wisoot A.
       

No.  There is no way to remove the quota files.  They are using very little
storage so it shouldn't be a problem.
[Posted by WWW Notes gateway]

    What I said in .1 is still true.
    
    AdvFS _ALWAYS_ keeps track of disk usage for users in the quota files. 
    It does not matter what /etc/fstab has for mount options.  
    
    Do not confuse keeping track of disk usage with enforcing quotas.
    
    If you will not beleive me, then please see the "System Adminstration"
    manual AA-PS2RC-TE, Chapter 8, section 8.6 "Managing Quotas (the book I
    was looking at was from v3.2, so the actual location in the book may
    have changed between v3.2 and a newer version of the book):
    
        "AdvFS quota maintenance traces file and disk space usage.  It
        keeps a record of the number of files and blocks a user or group is
        using in the quota.user and quota.group files found in the root
        directory of the fileset.  The AdvFS quota system always maintains
        quota information.  Unlike UFS, this function cannot be disabled."
    
    So AdvFS will _ALWAYS_ have a quota.group and a quota.user.  Deleting
    them is the equivalent of corrupting the AdvFS fileset.   The customer
    can _NOT_ delete these files.
    
    ----
    
    And as I tried to point out in .1, the AdvFS quota files are "Sparse"
    files and most likely DO NOT uses 2GB of storage.  They use a small
    percentage of that storage.
    
    A sparse file is created by a program that uses a seek system call to
    jump around inside the file and write data in a non-contiguous manor. 
    The file system only allocates space in the area where the program
    writes.  The file system maintains a map of allocated blocks for each
    file and uses this map to know when to return zeros if an unallocated
    area is read, or to allocate storage if data is written to a currently
    unallocated area.
    
    To see how much actual storage the file is using you can use several
    commands.
    
    	ls -ls quota.user	# number in 1st column is allocation in 1K incs
    or
    	du -k quota.user	# allocation in 1K increments
    
    I think that if your customer checks the actual allocation of the
    quota.user and quota.group files they will see that the files have only
    allocated a small percentage of the 2GB.
    
    If this is not the case, then please provide the output from the above
    ls and du commands along with the output from the showfdmn and showfset
    commands for the domain and fileset.
    
    					Bob Harris

    Hi,
    
    Splendid explanation, Bob !
    
    I am just going to complete it by saying that ADVFS uses the UID (or
    GID for quota.group) as an index to store the quota figures for a
    specific user.
    
    Manu.