Disk Quotas by security group?

[Crispin]

Does anyone know if this is possible?

 

For example I'm trying to assign, say, a 2GB quota to our media students and 1GB for others.

 

I can't seem to find any references to Group based disk quota allocation.

 

Any ideas?

 

PS. We will be running on server 2008 or 2008 R2.

[Ignatius]

I don't know if it's possible easily - I'm thinking laterally.

 

It seems that Disk Quota details are stored in the registry (Disk Quotas Tools and Settings: Local File Systems) so isn't it possible to create an .ADM file to enable Disk Quotas for the appropriate groups then specify the limits?

[Crispin]

problem is as far as I can see, quotas are always per volume. Therefore the only way I can think of working it is to create volumes on our SAN for each of the different quotas we want to use.

 

ie.

 

D: Students

E: Staff

F: Media Students

G: Unmanaged users

 

etc...

 

which is, of course, not at all ideal! Although it is a 12TB SAN so there's room to play. Id rather not do that though as it's a bit arse about face.

 

What I don't get is that you can specify individual users in the quota 'entries' but not groups? Makes no sense to me...

[azrael78]

Server 2003 R2 had the FSRM role - are you telling me that 2008 or 2008 R2 DOESN'T have this?!

 

If not - seems like a huge step backwards.

 

Az

[srochford]

 

What I don't get is that you can specify individual users in the quota 'entries' but not groups? Makes no sense to me...

 

If you're using windows quota management then that's just the way it works. It tracks the owner of the file and although you can change a file owner to a group, by default when it's created the owner is the user who created it. (Incidentally, this is one of the problems with quota management when you move files to a new server - the owner changes so you must remember to fix it or quotas don't behave!)

 

I'm sure there's third party software which does allow you to manage it by group or just by folder no matter who put the files there. It wouldn't be too hard to have a service which checks the size of each file in a folder as it changes, checks the owner to see if it's in the relevant group and increases the total if so.

 

If you have Server 2008 then you can set quotas by folder - it no longer has to be per volume. Some info about it here: File Server Resource Manager

[Crispin]

Server 2003 R2 had the FSRM role - are you telling me that 2008 or 2008 R2 DOESN'T have this?!

 

Not at all. I've been playing with FSRM on a 2008 R2 VM and its all there. Pretty similar to 2003.

 

I may look at ways round having to give different limits to students. There's just such a big gap between what they use I don't want to give them all a 1GB limit across the board. Most of Yr7+8 never get above 100MB whereas some media students can easily get above 2GB.

 

Alternatively I could just use a blanket 'soft' quota for all and use it as a monitoring technique.

[PiqueABoo]

So can't you move their folders under two different places e.g.

 

..\Students\Standard\

..\Students\Media\

 

Then use different Auto Apply quotas on the parents (Standard = 1GB & Media = 2GB)?

 

Or just do the same with all students then manually override the auto-applied quota with a 2GB one for media students?

[Crispin]

I think that would be the best solution. Using seperate shares for the home folders based on 'Standard' and 'media' like you say.

 

Just trying to think about how this would impact on profile paths within the user account for home folder redirection. Would require a little more administration...

 

But yes, didn't realise that server 2008 allows you to set quota per share rather than just volumes. That will help a lot.

[PiqueABoo]

But yes, didn't realise that server 2008 allows you to set quota per share rather than just volumes

 

Absolutely. Strictly it's a quota per *folder*, which may or may not be shared. For instance I've done it for this kind of path:

 

D:\FolderRedirect\Staff\Teachers\\Documents

 

There is one share at D:\FolderRedirect.

 

The FolderRedirect, Staff and Teachers folders have some interesting NTFS permissions to a) keep them from getting into each others folders, b) let Windows create the sub-folder for them on first logon.

 

The auto-apply quota is at D:\FolderRedirect\Staff\Teachers and is automatically applied to the sub-folders.

Edited August 26, 2009 by PiqueABoo