Re: Elastic Quota File System (EQFS)

From: Fao, Sean
Date: Sat Jun 26 2004 - 20:47:42 EST


Stephen Wille Padnos wrote:

Fao, Sean wrote:

Amit Gud wrote:

Fao, Sean wrote:

Amit Gud wrote:

It cannot be denied that there _are_ applications for such a system that we already discussed and theres a class of users who will find the system useful.


I personally see no use whatsoever. Why not just allocate 100% of the file system to everybody and ignore quota's, entirely? Each user will use whatever he/she requires and when space starts to run out, users will manually clean up what they don't need.


We should get our basics right first. We _do_ need quotas!! Without any quota system how are we going to avoid a malicious user from taking away all the space to keep other people starving? In EQFS also this can happen, but we are giving *controlled flexibility* to the user. He is having some stretching power but not beyond a certain limit. And do you think users are sincere enough to clean up there files when they are done?


And I suppose you think that users will be sincere enough to mark files as elastic? I, for one, already said that I absolutely would *not* mark a single file as elastic. If I'm using 110 MB and you need an additional 10 MB for storage, you won't be getting it from me because I don't want to come in some morning to find that a file has disappeared.

The system that you're asking for is a system without quotas. Think about what you're saying.


I think you missed one of the main points - you don't get any extra space until you mark some of your files as elastic.
You're right - under this system, nobody would get any space from deletion of your files because you would use the system as a normal hard quota system - you would mark no files as elastic, and would therefore be limited to your quota (in the example you gave, you would not be using 110M, because your quota would have limited you to 100M). If you were so kind as to mark something as elastic (say, that recently doneloaded install tarball of the Gimp), then you would remove the storage taken by those files from your quota usage and would have more space available, with the risk that the elastic files might not stick around.


You're right; I did missunderstand one of the main points. I was under the impression that I could take whatever I needed, as long as it were available. This does change my view on the subject, somewhat.

Thanks for clearing that up,

Sean
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