Poor interaction between chown and quota
Hi:
In the process of debugging a variety of quota problems visible in
procmail-based mail delivery and qpopper-based mail pickup, I believe I've
identified an interaction problem between chown and quota. Essentially,
if a program running as superuser creates/appends/edits a file which would
put the user over soft quota, and then chown's it to the appropriate user,
the user is considered over soft quota with NO grace period. I've already
found this to be problematic in the following situations:
1) I use sendmail with procmail as the local delivery agent. If an
incoming message would put the user over soft quota, the message is
returned undeliverable with the message "overquota". IMHO, this shouldn't
happen unless the user would exceed hard quota or has expired his/her
grace period. The tricky part is I use a perl script run out of cron to
notify people if they're over quota...unfortunately I notify via email.
2) I use qpopper to offer email to our customers. Quotas are enforced
(10M soft, 21M hard) on the /var partition, which therefore limits both
the user's mailbox and the corresponding copy which qpopper creates
beneath /var/spool/pop . Since the user's mailbox can't exceed 10M (see
problem 1, above), the user can't (easily) exceed 20M of disk usage while
qpopper has the /var/spool/pop/username.pop file in use, so the user can't
exceed their hard quota. Some of our users are unable to POP their mail
because of the following error:
Apr 1 13:15:59 webhost in.qpopper[8981]: aew@jdm16.jdweb.com: -ERR Unable
to copy mail spool file, quota exceeded (122)
Obviously, something isn't right. Are there any patches/fixes that I can
apply? Should I file a bug, and if so, against which package? If anyone
wants further information, please email. TIA!
tcsh# dpkg -s qpopper
Package: qpopper
Status: install ok installed
Priority: extra
Section: mail
Installed-Size: 110
Maintainer: Miquel van Smoorenburg <miquels@cistron.nl>
Version: 2.2-4
tcsh# dpkg -s procmail
Package: procmail
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: mail
Installed-Size: 209
Maintainer: Santiago Vila <sanvila@ctv.es>
Version: 3.10.4-2
tcsh# dpkg -s quota
Package: quota
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 118
Maintainer: Heiko Schlittermann <heiko@lotte.sax.de>
Version: 1.55-8
tcsh# dpkg -s fileutils
Package: fileutils
Essential: yes
Status: install ok installed
Priority: required
Section: base
Installed-Size: 1011
Maintainer: Galen Hazelwood <galenh@micron.net>
Version: 3.16-2
Pete
--
Peter J. Templin, Jr.
Systems and Networks Administrator
JD-WEB Computer Sales and Service
429 Market St. templin@jdweb.com
Lewisburg, PA 17837 (717)523-6800
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