Scientific Unix (clone of Red Hat Enterprise 5), x86_64
ext3 file system

I just set up a 6 TB RAID for a small group of users. There are some of them who will fill up all space available, so I decided to set quotas. I chose to make a hard quote of a little more than 2 TB, and I got a surprise. When I used edquota, it reduced the quota for a small number. After a bit of thought I realized that the number of disk blocks in 2 TB is the biggest number that will fit in a 32-bit unsigned integer. I cut the limit down to a little less than 2TB, and it seems to be happy.

Inquiring minds want to know:
Is this a general limit on ext3 file systems?
How would other file systems compare?
(Feel free to start a religious war about the various file systems; I'm curious.)

Depending on the block size, there might be a limit of 2 TB. I don't think that is the issue though, seeing as how you already have a 6 TB partition.

Thanks. That clarifies my thinking. Probably the limit I hit is in the edquota program. I suppose I could write my own little program to set quotas using the quotactl() call. It appears to use 64-bit integers, according to the man page. Is there another way?

How did you define the hard and soft limits, and what was the size difference between your quota and the reduced quota?