System Administration: How to limit users' available storage space
 

I have installed two Linux OSs, Mandriva and Debian. Each operating system is on a 15Gb partition and I would therefore like to limit how much users can store in their home folders and in general (anywhere else for that matter). I'd like to limit the totality of each user's storage space to 1Gb. There are children using the computer, and the computer will be used primarily for playing games, web browsing, IM, etc., not for storing files. I had a look at the GUI tools in KDE and GNOME but wasn't able to find anything that allowed me to do this. I tried googling it, but didn't find an answer to my question (wrong keywords?). Does anybody know if this is possible, and if it is, how to do it? What is the main configuration file? Is there a default user configuration file?

Many thanks.

google or man quota. It can be done via webmin

"Quota" was the word I should have used in my Google search. I found a really good site. What do you think?

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...ge_with_Quotas

I haven't tried it yet. I read the article, I'm going to think about it and do some more research, then I'm pretty sure I'm going to try it.

That looks like a good howto -- there's also a good duide over at The Linux Documentation Project (tldp.org).

Okay, I gave it a try - or tried giving it a try! - but there's a problem. Everything in each of my two Linux distros are mounted to "/". There is no separate "/home" partition. It seems that the first thing I have to do is to edit my /etc/fstab file and add "usrquota" to the list of options. In the HowTo's I've consulted, this is not done to the entire "/" partition, but only to the "/home", "/usr" or other partition. Can I do this to the entire "/" partition? Will this affect the "system" users (not actual users, but the actual system)? Kids will be using the computer and so I want put a hard limit of 1GB for each user. There will be 4 user accounts and there's only 15GB of space available for each distro (actually, not even, because that includes everything (system, etc.), everything except swap). Each distro is on a 15GB partition.

Can I use the 'usrquota' option on "/"?? Might this cause problems later on?

Many thanks.