CSIL disk quota Troubleshooting
If you are having trouble with your account you may be over quota.
Here is how you can tell:
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$ quota -v
Disk quotas for user michaelhinrichs (uid 24268):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
frigga:/local/home/student
'''344192*''' '''300000''' 350000 none 5492 8000 8500
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$
You can also use quota -vs which gives a little more readable output:
Disk quotas for user pconrad (uid 22885):
Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace
tyr.engr.ucsb.edu:/local/home/student
0K 6144M 7680M 0 100k 105k
There are two parts to being limited on CSIL. You are limited by your blocks (disk space) and by your number of files. First shown here is how to check and clean up disk space.
If you are wondering what a disk quota or file quota is, you can scroll down to the section with the title “Why Quotas?”.
Block limit problems (too many bytes)
To see what is causing the problem with we can do two commands:
The first one shows us how much disk space our ‘'’regular’’’ files are taking up
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$ du -sh *
6.6M cs24
4.0K Desktop
8.0K Documents
3.3M Download
400K Firefox_wallpaper.png
4.0K Music
3.2M NetBeansProjects
4.0K Pictures
4.0K Public
36K public_html
4.0K Templates
4.0K Videos
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$
We can see that, of the regular files, CS24 is taking up the most room, but we DONT need to delete that! In a minute we will show how to investigate that further…
You can also check to see the top ten folders taking up disk space by running du -sk and piping that output to a sort, then piping that sorted list to head, which lists the first ten lines.
[goodman@booboo ~]$ du -sk * .??* | sort -rn | head
95040 .mozilla
82084 .netbeans
29592 .local
11052 ccache.tar.gz
8148 .ccache
7768 .pulse
3696 .wapi
2044 .cache
1524 .adobe
1276 cs1l.tar.gz
[goodman@booboo ~]$
The second one shows us how much disk space our ‘'’hidden’’’ files are taking up, as you can see from .thunderbird and .mozilla, this is where the REAL space is being taken up. Look at the numbers for .thunderbird and .mozilla:
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$ du -sh .[A-z]*
0 .bash_history
4.0K .bash_logout
4.0K .bash_profile
4.0K .bashrc
164K .cache
8.6M .ccache
72K .config
4.0K .cshrc
4.0K .cvspass
212K .dbus
96K .emacs.d
4.0K .esd_auth
476K .evolution
116K .fontconfig
4.0K .forward
588K .gconf
4.0K .gconfd
104K .gnome2
4.0K .gnome2_private
372K .gstreamer-0.10
4.0K .gtk-bookmarks
4.0K .gvfs
28K .ICEauthority
120K .icedteaplugin
4.0K .icons
0 .imsettings.log
320K .kde
4.0K .lesshst
9.9M .local
4.0K .login
560K .macromedia
15M .mozilla
608K .nautilus
58M .netbeans
16K .netbeans-registration
12K .netx
4.4M .openoffice.org
12K .outfile.swp
4.0K .profile
6.3M .pulse
4.0K .pulse-cookie
4.0K .recently-used.xbel
4.0K .saves-27343-freakazoid.cs.ucsb.edu
4.0K .saves-9316-bart.cs.ucsb.edu
8.0K .ssh
56K .subversion
4.0K .themes
24K .thumbnails
199M .thunderbird
124K .tomboy
8.0K .tomboy.log
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-11.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-12.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-19.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-23.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-24.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-25.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-26.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-29.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-2.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-4.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-5.tmp
0 .uc-429d3c16fe89cafdc89c5ddef25a08b0.michaelhinrichs.esbtl-8.tmp
8.0K .viminfo
19M .wapi
4.0K .Xauthority
du: cannot access `.xsession-errors': Input/output error
0 .xsession-errors.old
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$
If you don’t care about your bookmarks in your web browser (.mozilla) and you have your email somewhere else besides thunderbird, you can delete both of those directories.
Here’s how.
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$ echo rm -rf .thunderbird
rm -rf .thunderbird
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$ rm -rf .thunderbird
[michaelhinrichs@butthead ~]$ quota -v
Disk quotas for user michaelhinrichs (uid 24268):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
frigga:/local/home/student
'''140460 300000''' 350000 5357 8000 8500
Two very important things about this step:
1) The echo command just prints the text that follows after the code and acts as a safety because if if you accidentally execute rm -rf on the wrong thing, you will have effectively deleted all of your files in the CSIL domain.
2) Make sure that you are in your home directory or you wont delete any of your .thunderbird files.
Number Of Files Problems (too many files)
Now if you are being limited by number of files, you can run the command countfiles from Phill Conrad’s bin directory as follows:
[goodman@booboo ~]$ /cs/faculty/pconrad/bin/countfiles
Searching: current directory (this might take a few minutes)...
Files Directory
_____ _________
1811 .netbeans
1009 .mozilla
615 .ccache
323 .pulse
309 .gconf
138 .macromedia
138 .local
131 cs130a
101 .dbus
88 .config
-------------------------------------
5160 in entire directory
Use count_files.pl --man for more information
This useful script comes from this git repo and used to be maintained on CSIL, but was removed for reasons that still are not entirely clear (since there is no other common Unix utility that fills this niche.)
If you’ve taken a number of CS classes and are not bumping up against the blocks quota, you can simply choose to tarball your older CS folders in order to reduce the file count of each folder to 1. You can always untar them again later if you need them (tar -zxvf cs24.tar.gz is used to undo restore from the tarball. )
[goodman@booboo ~]$ tar -cvzf cs24.tar.gz cs24
Why Quotas?
On large shared systems, it’s important to make sure that users share the resource fairly. If any user has unrestricted access to create files without limit, any user could block all users from the system by simply filling up the disk. It woudl essentially be a “denial of service” attack, whether intentional or unintentional.
Quotas help prevent that.
For example, a CS8 or CS16 student might be learing how to write to files, but they end up with an infinite loop in their program. That would fill up the entire disk and crash the system for everyone if we didn’t have quotas.
But with quotas in place, instead, the students program just writes until that user’s quota is exceeded, and then it crashes only that user’s program. Everyone else is able to continue working.