Disk quota is working only for hard limit. I am not getting any warning message when the size is crossing the soft limit.

any suggestions ??

I have enable user Quota on /export/home shared folder in NFS server and created the user limit. In the NFS client as a user "test" whose home folder is hosted on NFS server under /export/home/test tried checking the limits.

server:~# uname -a
Linux nas-new01 4.19.0-8-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.98-1 (2020-01-26) x86_64 GNU/Linux

server:~# quota -v 57411
Disk quotas for user #57411 (uid 57411):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/dev/sdb 8 1024 2048 3 0 0



client:~>pwd
/home/test

client:~> id -u
57411

client:~> du -shc
8.0K .
8.0K total

client:~> dd if=/dev/zero of=file1.txt bs=1024K count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB, 1.0 MiB) copied, 0.02055 s, 51.0 MB/s

client:~> du -shc
1.1M .
1.1M total

client:~> dd if=/dev/zero of=file2.txt bs=512K count=1 ****<<<< Crossed soft limit. But no warning****
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
524288 bytes (524 kB, 512 KiB) copied, 0.012272 s, 42.7 MB/s

client:~> du -shc
1.6M .
1.6M total

client:~> dd if=/dev/zero of=file3.txt bs=1024K count=2
dd: closing output file 'file3.txt': Disk quota exceeded

As far as I remember you only got a message when you've been over the SOFT limit for a week. The first 7 days you're allowed to got over that limit.
But it's been quite a while (more then 6 years) that I've worked with user quota's, so I may remember wrongly.

Hi ehartman,

Thanks for your reply!
But, if at all there isn't any warning immediately after the soft limit has reached, because user doesn't know about this, a situation might occur where the user might cross hard limit suddenly in the middle of an operation of generating/copying files. So, whatever the files are that are copied post hard limit, they will be created but with size of 0. So, there will be inconsistency and all this happens as a shock to the user as he hasn't been warned during the grace period. So, logically, there should be a warning as soon as soft limit is reached.

Unless the user is running the 'bad' cmd manually, he won't see the warning anyway.
You could try a cronjob using repquota or quotacheck, run as often as you desire, then parse & email to relevant 'bad' people..