Notify User of Disk Quota

[five]

We were dealing with a situation where our /opt/sas was filling up and it ended up being the WORK location, that was the problem. We have since changed that to elsewhere on the machine. Hopefully that will keep the system from going down if the disk fills up again.

If we decide to implement disk quotas as well, is there a way to notify the user when they hit that limitation?

"Maximum file size is 100GB, please contact the system administrator if you need more space"

We want the users to understand what is happening and encourage them to come to us, if they need more resources, rather than assuming it's just not possible.

Kind of along the same mindset, while researching this, I found this old OpenVMS SAS 8 article and am curious if it still sound theory? We can have users use their own home directory instead of WORK for temp files?

[JackHamilton]

We have a similar problem, but unfortunately some peculiarity in how Solaris quotas work prevents them from being useful for work space overruns.  Or any kind of space policing, unfortunately.  So a few times the whole system has stopped working correctly because a rogue program has used up all of our terabytes of work space.

Redirecting WORK= or USER= (or both) to the user's home drive should be possible.  WORK= has to go into the configuration file, but USER= can go into either the configuration file or a program (or the autoexec).

Also, read up on UTILLOC, which is also used for some kinds of work files.  Depending on your setup, you might need to redirect that as well.

We have dedicated work drives that are faster than regular user drives, so for us redirecting WORK would cause a performance hit.  On Windows, we redirect WORK to a network drive so no protected health information is stored locally.  Slower, but we don't want users to run big jobs on Windows anyway,

[gwootton]

Sending notifications based on quotas would be a function of the OS rather than SAS, but it looks like there is a warnquota program set up to do this:
https://linux.die.net/man/8/warnquota
I'm not familiar with it but it sounds like it's something you'd run via cron rather than being dynamic. Maybe you could monitor system logs for when these limitations are hit and notify on it that way.
You can specify any path for WORK as long as the user has permission to write to it, so a user's home directory could be a valid option. It might be difficult to perform cleanup actions on orphaned work paths when the path isn't centralized though.

[Kurt_Bremser]

The notification is already there, it's in the SAS log. Users need only be educated that "disk full" most likely means "quota exceeded" when introduced to your environment..