Fixing Quota Issues

If your project needs larger quotas, please contact your consultant to discuss your needs and how we can help you.

Please visit Storage Systems for the properties of the file systems HOME, WORK, and PERM.

Please periodically check whether your scientific results data stored on HLRN file systems should be periodically transferred to the user’s home institution. To maintain good I/O performance for all user jobs, the usage of the shared file systems of the HLRN resources needs to be limited.

Quota defaults

The default values for user quota are reasonable for average use cases. We are aware that certain projects need larger quota for their workflows. If your project needs larger quotas, please contact your consultant to discuss your needs and how we can help you.

File system quotas at HLRN are enforced

• on HOME and WORK with respect to group ownerships
• on PERM with respect to user ownerships on Lise in Berlin
• on PERM with respect to group ownerships for block and storage location (user or project directory) for inode on Emmy in Göttingen

Quota is available on the three file systems HOME, WORK and PERM. On each file system we distinguish

• quota for blocks, that is the disk space your files allocate, and
• quota for inodes, that is the number of files and directories.

Each quota consists of two numbers, the soft limit and the hard limit.

• Once your usage achieves the soft limit, the grace peroid of 2 weeks starts to count. By the end of the grace period you are not able to write files. As soon as you drop down below your soft limit the grace period is reseted.
• Once your usage achieves the hard limit, you are not able to write files.

Check your quota

Check your disk quota limits using the command hlrnquota. If your user ID is member of one or more project groups you will also get quota information for these project groups. Each of your files and directories is owned by your user ID (user ownership) and by exactly one of the group IDs you are a member in (group ownership). The data base for the output of hlrnquota is updated twice per hour.

blogin4:~ $ hlrnquota
Home
                           Blocks used   Soft limit   Hard limit     Inodes used   Soft limit   Hard limit   
  myaccount  (users)          89.45 GiB       40 GiB      100 GiB         187.3 k            -            -   
  prj00012  (projects)        68.03 GiB       40 GiB      100 GiB         659.6 k            -            -   
 
Work
                           Blocks used   Soft limit   Hard limit     Inodes used   Soft limit   Hard limit   
  myaccount  (users)          1.202 TiB        3 TiB       30 TiB          1.74 k        250 k        1.5 M   
  prj00012  (projects)        2.512 TiB       12 TiB       30 TiB               1          1 M          6 M   

If your HOME quota is exceeded, we recommend

• to check whether you can either delete files or move files from HOME to WORK (no backup!) or to PERM
• to contact your consultant, explain your storage needs, and ask for a higher quota limits.

If your WORK quota is exceeded, we recommend

• to check whether you can delete files or move files from WORK to PERM
• to change the group ownership of files to “move” their attribution from the quota of your primary group (user ID) to the quota of another group (e.g. prj00012)
• to contact your consultant, explain your storage needs, and ask for higher quota limits.

Quota and unix groups

For each file and directory stored on the HOME or WORK file systems:

Sometimes this can make it hard to track down the disk quota when files or directories of a given group ownership are distributed over different user and/or project directories.

Each user ID is member of one or more groups. Group memberships can be checked with the groups command.

blogin4:~ $ groups myaccount
myaccount prj00012

When, for example, you decide to change the group ownership of a file to prj00012, the size of this file will affect the disk quota of group prj00012.

blogin4:~ $ chgrp prj00012 somefile.txt
blogin4:~ $ ls -l somefile.txt
-rw-------  1 myaccount prj00012 237271040 Jul  3  2020 somefile.txt

To change all small number of files in a directory recursively, use “chgrp -R”. To update many files, especially on the Lustre filesystems, you should use “lfs find” instead:

blogin4:~ $ lfs find somedirectory | xargs chgrp prj00012
blogin4:~ $ ls -ld somedirectory
drwx------  1 myaccount  prj00012      4096 Jul  3  2020 somedirectory

If your file or directory names contain spaces, you will need to use “lfs find -0 … | xargs -0 …” instead.

Access for group members

Once a file (or a complete directory) has the group ownership, the file might be accessed by all users in the group.

blogin4:~ $ ls -l somefile.txt
-rw-------  1 myaccount prj00012 237271040 Jul  3  2020 somefile.txt
blogin4:~ $ chmod g+r somefile.txt
blogin4:~ $ ls -l somefile.txt
-rw-r-----  1 myaccount prj00012 237271040 Jul  3  2020 somefile.txt

blogin4:~ $ ls -ld somedirectory
drwx------  1 myaccount  prj00012      4096 Jul  3  2020 somedirectory
blogin4:~ $ lfs find somedirectory |xargs chmod g+rX
blogin4:~ $ ls -ld somedirectory
drwxr-x---  1 myaccount  prj00012      4096 Jul  3  2020 somedirectory

Quota exceeded

Disk space, Blocks

Once you experience too many Blocks you should check for disk usage in a directory.

blogin4:~ $ du -sh /home/myaccount/somedirectory
1.4G /home/myaccount/somedirectory
blogin4:~ $ du -sh /home/myaccount/somedirectory/*
227M /home/myaccount/somedirectory/subdir1
627M /home/myaccount/somedirectory/subdir2
...

Number of files, Inodes

Once you experience too many Inodes you should count the number of files in a directory.

blogin4:~ $ lfs find /home/myaccount/somedirectory | wc -l
201