Student Novell quota management

This document applies to the NetWare 6 Student Novell system. (Tree name "STUDENT-AU")

Individual student accounts are assigned a U: drive on which they store course work, personal files, and configuration files used by the software that runs in the student laboratories. By default, all students are issued with a 25M quota, although certain groups of students qualify for additional resources. The main group to be issued with additional space are Postgraduate Research students.

The issuing of additional space is carried out automatically by CRUX and the MDS, based on input from Callista.

Since the CRUX management scripts do not have direct access to the Novell file-system, quota setting is a two step process:

CRUX sets an attribute in the Novell student directory, indicating what the quota should be set to.
The QWATCH software runs on the student Novell servers and sets the physical disk quota to the values specified.

Checking quotas and usage

What Quota is set?

To check the quota that has been applied to the Novell U: drive, the student can run either dquota.exe or spacemon.exe when logged in themself. The first of these is a command-line utility that will display the text of the current quota, disk usage and free-space. The spacemon.exe utility displays a graphical icon in the Windows system tray that will display the current quota and usage when the mouse is moved over it.

Example 1: Default output from DQUOTA

C:\>dquota

Directory quota for fxyz1 (ITS-TSHD-A02/HOME_F:fxyz1) (units = Bytes)

Disk Quota:            26,214,400
Disk in use:            9,035,776
                    -------------
Disk Available:        17,178,624

Example 2: DQUOTA displaying output in Megabytes

C:\>dquota /cm

Directory quota for fxyz1 (ITS-TSHD-A02/HOME_F:fxyz1) (units = MB)

Disk Quota:                25.000
Disk in use:                8.617
                    -------------
Disk Available:            16.383

Example 3: SPACEMON icon and display

What should CRUX set?

To check the quota that CRUX will set, view the student details via the MDS tool and view the novellquota: field.

If no value is displayed, then the default 25M quota will apply.

What quota did CRUX set?

To check that CRUX has set the quota for the QWATCH software, the value of the JRBS:Home Directory Quota attribute for the student account needs to be viewed in the Novell ConsoleOne utility. This will be displayed under the Other tab, and should not be manually altered.

The value displayed is in 4k blocks, a 100M quota will be displayed as the value 25600.

Troubleshooting

1: Student cannot save files, zero free space in U: drive. If the Novell quota displayed by SPACEMON matches the quota displayed by the MDS tool, then the student needs to free up space.

2: The MDS tool states that the student has the default 25M quota. Either Callista does not record this student as requiring additional resources, or the MDS has not acted on this information. Callista/MDS problem.

3L MDS tool displays one quota value, SPACEMON.EXE displays another. Either the MDS did not write the quota to the Novell system, or the QWATCH software did not process it. If the JRBS:Home_Directory_Quota attribute reflects the correct quota, then the Novell server software is at fault. If no attribute is present, or it has an incorrect value, then this is a problem with the CRUX/MDS scripts.