Re: Poor interaction between chown and quota
On Thu, 2 Apr 1998, Pete Templin wrote:
:
: 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.
Hmm, I hadn't noticed this (yet). I will test and try to confirm.
: 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)
Since quotas are filesystem based, you must plan your filesystem
layout accordingly. The only easy way around this is to either insure
that /var/spool/mail and /var/spool/pop are seperate filesystems, or
grab the qpopper sources and make popper put its tempfiles somewhere
other than /var/spool/pop ... preferably a seperate filesystem. I don't
think you can blame the second problem on qpopper.
I ran into this problem with a BSDi box ... they put both the mailbox
_and_ the popfile in /var/mail! That wasn't too optimal :)
--
Nathan Norman
MidcoNet - 410 South Phillips Avenue - Sioux Falls, SD 57104
mailto://finn@midco.net http://www.midco.net
finger finn@kepler.midco.net for PGP Key: (0xA33B86E9)
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