server not allowing users to "overuse" or "oversell" resources

R

rszkutak

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Scottsdale, AZ & Clam Gulch, AK
to preface this issue; my server was migrated from another server that had DA on it and was running about 3 years without this issue... so it has to be something easy.

Basically, say i allocate each user with 500Mb of disk space and indicate in the "package" that they are allowed to go over the allocated resources or "oversell" / "overuse". This specific version of DA is now allowing users to do that.

On the old DA server the same setting was checked, and it worked perfectly.. users would go over if they needed to and no issues.

As of now i have had users who call me with "server down" emergencies only to drop what i am doing, get into the server and realize they are max'd out on disk space usage. I increase thier limit a bit ( generally 20% ) to get them going.

This is really getting annoying, i don't mind giving more disk space if it's really needed for legit use, but it simply stops the email up entirely. Anyone know how to fix this or what is really going on ?

Thanks,
Rob
 
Things to look for:

Is this server storing email in the /home partition where the old one was storing it in the /var partition (/var/spool/virtual (Maildir vs mbox)?

Are partition quotas turned on for this server but not the old server?

Jeff
 
Jeff,
The only real change from the standard email system that i did was covert it over to dovecot, other than that nothing else is non standard.

You hit the nail on the head though, when the limit's get reached the website keeps functionin properly, as does the webmail which i know is obviously in a different directory so that makes me think your spot on.

I dont' have access to the old server anymore, it's essentially down. The facility that owns it changed the admin password in DA and the root password.

How would i go about looking for this, you know i am not the foremost expert in *NIX.

Rob
 
Can you clarify what type of accounts are affected? Users or Resellers? The term overselling only applies to a Reseller and the limits he sets in User accounts he creates. It allows him to create accounts that total a potential limit higher than he is allowed. Users themselves still cannot go over this limit.. they never could. The only explanation for your old server would be if the system quotas were not counting properly, or if they were simply not enforcing properly (if quotas didn't exist in the quotas). So unless I misread something (quite possible) the problem was that the old system wasn't working right, and the new system is in fact enforcing limits properly.
Reworded, overselling only applies to account creation rules. Overselling doesn't apply to actual quota usage itself, the limit the user has is the limit the user gets.

If you don't want to set limits for the Users, then give them unlimited usage. Alternatively, you can simply shut off the quotas in the system:

quotaoff -a

which would also stop it's enforcement, but would likely also stop the disk usage counting.

John
 
John,
Thanks for the response.

To clairfy this a little further, we are having this issue on end users. We only have 2 "resellers" in the system, and about 100 end users. Our reseller packages are set very high so the limit is not even encroached upon.

Example we have a domain called testing.com, it has been given the following details:

500Mb disk
10Gb transfer
25 email addy's
and so on..

When the user hit's 500mb, it essentially turns the email off as they have hit thier limit on the server.

If you want to see this live, i can duplicate this error time and time again if i move the site down in disk space. Please PM me and we can discusess confidential info that way if you wish.

Rob
 
Hello,

What you describe is the expected result.

Since emails use the same username on disk as the system quotas enforce for user uploaded files, once the 500meg limit is hit, the system quotas will not allow anymore file to be saved with that username, by any application (ftp, da, exim, dovecot).

Apart from shutting off quotas as mentioned before, another option is to set the hard limit for quotas high, but leave the soft limit as DA sets them.

Example, DA sets the quotas (using 1024 bytes as an example) as:
Code: 
setquota [b]username[/b] 1024 1024 0 0 /home
You could run:
Code: 
setquota [b]username[/b] 1024 2048 0 0 /home
Which gives him a 2k hard limit, and still leaves a 1k soft limit. The way this works is the system has a time limit (somewhere around 7 days I believe) where the user can over over his 1k limit, but after the 7 days are up, it enforces the hard limit as the soft... I believe... I haven't ever set a different hard limit than a soft limit, so I'm honestly not completely positive how that works, but that's the basic idea.. you get the firm limit but with some leaway for usage.

John
 
I found this:
Code: 
"Grace Period" is configured with the command "edquota -t", "grace period" is a time limit before the "soft limit" is enforced for a file system with quota enabled. Time units of sec(onds), min(utes), hour(s), day(s), week(s), and month(s) can be used. This is what you'll see with the command "edquota -t":

System response:

    * Linux Kernel 2.4+: Red Hat 7.1+/Fedora:

      Grace period before enforcing soft limits for users:
      Time units may be: days, hours, minutes, or seconds
        Filesystem             Block grace period     Inode grace period
        /dev/hda5                     7days                  7days
Also, I want to add that we found when switching from mbox to Maildir all of a sudden email quotas that were never counted against the limt before were being counted. It appears that the /var partition didn't have quotas turned on but the /home partition does.

For us anyway.

And another thing: probably best is to never set Inode grace period or limit.

Jeff
 
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