regarding virtual private server
 

i was given a virtual private server to work upon , the problem is it is not reporting quotas ,
when checked for the file system it says that no file system is configured . please tell me how to partition a virtual private server and how to setup quotas on it.

You will first need to enable quotas on the relevant filesystems (partitions).
Check the /etc/fstab file. Typically you would want to setup the /home or /var partitions with quotas. If you do not have separate /home or /var (or wherever you want to set up quotas) partitions, you can always enable it for the / filesystem.

The entry in /etc/fstab should look like one of these:

The first entry is for an LVM, while the second is for a regular partition.

Next step remount the filesystems with the changed options. Use umount & mount to reload the filesystem with the quota options. If you enable quotas on / or /var or /usr, you will need to reboot for the changes to take effect.

Use quotacheck to check & update usage / create the quota files (aquota.user & aquota.group).

Next use the setquota or edquota commands to enable quotas for the users / groups you wish to impose quotas on.
Use quotaon / quotaoff to enable / disable the quotas as needed. repquota to generate a report.

finding problems with /proc/partitions
 

thank you so much for the reply
i tried to work out things as you said but when i issued the command
fdisk -l it throws an error message saying that it cannot open proc/partitions , so iam unable to figure out how to find the disk partitions.

please help me solve this issue , i've just started my career as a sys admin(infact just 5 dayas ago)iam very intent upon learning things

On a virtual private server (VPS), you cannot do an 'fdisk' unless your hosting provider is actually using an OS virtualization software. You can always see the partitions mounted / available to you by looking at the /etc/fstab (which you are accessing under your own chrooted environment).

Just do a 'df -h' to see what partitions are available. You can also do 'cat /etc/fstab'.

Please be careful here, because different hosting providers implement VPS differently, and if the provider is not giving you a chrooted environment, you will be looking at the fstab of the server itself. If you see that the output of either df -h or cat /etc/fstab is showing you significantly more disk space than you paid for, please do NOT proceed with any of the steps recommended earlier. You will then want to confirm with your hosting provider on implementing quotas.