Mobile Accounts and Disk Quota?

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Mobile Accounts and Disk Quota?

Hello All.
I have a question about how to do something with Mobile Accounts.

We have a student photography/video lab of 32 iMacs connected to a Mac Pro Open Directory server. To save on server disk space the mobile accounts only sync ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Documents.

I want to be able to enable a quota ONLY on the data being synced up to the server, not on the local machine. I want them to be able to use as much disk space on the local machine they are logged into as they can, but be limited to 20GB space on the server (when the mobile account syncs)

If I enable a "Disk Quota" of 20GB to an account in workgroup manager, will this disk quota apply ONLY to the synced data, or will it also apply to other locations that are not synced?

Thank You

Message was edited by: TBNSD

Mac Pro OD Server & iMac Clients, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on May 6, 2010 7:47 AM

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Answer 1

TBNSD Author

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May 6, 2010 9:38 AM in response to TBNSD

Tested this out today.
Sync Preferences: On Login/Logout sync ~/Documents and ~/Library/Preferences
Logged in as Mobile Account test student with 20GB Home Dir. Quota
Copied 25GB of Music to Documents folder on local machine.
Logged Out - Home Sync Started, synced up to 20GB of ~/Documents/Music(Took a while) then stopped syncing. ~/Documents/Music never showed up in test student's home directory on the server.
Now everytime I login or logout it will keep trying to sync, get to 20GB, stop, and not leave the 20GB it did copy on the server.

I wish it would either warn of the 20GB Quota before syncing, or leave the 20GB it has copied on the server instead of stopping and removing it once it hits 20GB.

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Answer 2

TBNSD Author

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May 6, 2010 10:07 AM in response to TBNSD

Another Update:
It seems that if there is a Quota on the Home Directory and you try to sync and go over quota the sync stops, but it doesn't actually DELETE the files from the synced folder on the server. It creates a hidden folder that contains the files that were syncing when the quota was hit, named .fstemp.+RANDOM STRING.noindex that you can only delete by viewing hidden folders and browsing to your synced folder on the server.

This is pretty disheartening. I can see having to remove a lot of .fstemp. folders when students go over quota because they can't see that there are hidden folders taking up space.

Message was edited by: TBNSD

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Answer 3

TBNSD Author

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May 6, 2010 2:40 PM in response to TBNSD

Another Update: I solved my problem. The server actually wasn't enforcing quotas correctly. Now it tells a user when the quota has been reached and doesn't sync those files.

This causes another problem with shared group folders on the same volume as home directories. The disk quota set in WGM for a user applies to any shares on the entire volume, they are not seperate (Home Dir. vs Group Folder). The solution I've found is to create one partition for Shares and one for home directories.

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