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Date:      Tue, 9 Dec 1997 09:40:59 -0500 (EST)
From:      jack <jack@germanium.xtalwind.net>
To:        Jason Wells <jcwells@u.washington.edu>
Cc:        =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22=DEor=F0ur_Ivarsson=22?= <totii@est.is>, gaof@public.intercom.com.cn, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: about quota
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.971209092855.1043C-100000@germanium.xtalwind.net>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19971209073634.007c07a0@jcwells.deskmail.washington.edu>

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On Tue, 9 Dec 1997, Jason Wells wrote:

> At 13:15 12/8/97 +0000, Žoršur Ivarsson wrote:
> >Gao Fei wrote:
> >> 
> >Sendmail is running as 'root' and writes to the /var/mail throug local
> >mailer that runns as 'root'.
> 
> If you look in /var/mail at your mail file you will see it is owned by
> yourself. Since you have ownership of it, it should count against your
> quota. We have observer that this is not the case. So we ask, "What is
> going on?"

The mail file is normally written by mail.local running as root.  It is
then `chown'ed to the user.

> >Root has no quotas and therefor does not limit what user gets from
> >Sendmail.
> 
> If root makes a file owned by someone else and that file causes a quota
> violation, the user will get nabbed.

Absolutely, but root is allowed to write, and chown, a file that exceeds a
user's quota. 

> FWIW. You can establish a quota on root like any other user. It is not a
> very good idea though.
> 
> >When user fetches his mail, his mail is copied to temporary file, under
> >users name, that has quota, that has exeded!
> 
> This answer uses IRIX semantics.

I thought this was a FreeBSD  list.  :)

> (I may be making a big mistake here. Bare
> with me. The man pages seem to agree with what I will say.) Quota
> establishes a quota on a per filesystem basis. Take a peek at your
> /etc/fstab. 
> 
> More than likely this system has established a seperate /var filesystem.
> Also more that likely is that this system has not placed a quota on /var.
> There is no quota to violate on /var whatsoever.

The system never places quotas, the sysadmin does.

> When the user fetches mail, the data is copied into the /usr filesystem
> from the /var filesystem. The /usr filsystem DOES have quota. Bingo, the
> user gets nabbed for having more than one meg of storage.

Qpopper creates the temporary file in the /var/mail directory.  We have
many accounts that are e-mail only.  They have no directory on /usr, they
own no files on /usr, the only files they own are `username` and
`.username.pop' in /var/mail.

> Now. About the 800k of mail question. The user may have 200k of other
> files, which, when added to 800k exceed the quota. ::shrug:: It apears that
> FreeBSD does not have a 'number of files' limit.

Those `other files' would probably not be on the /var partition and thus
controlled by a different quota.

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