Homeroom space quotas to be set at 500mbby George SpainCCIT Technical Publisher Computer system administrators will soon begin implementing quotas on Homeroom space, according to John Imholz, Academic and Research Computing Services Manager at CCIT. Disk space quotas will be set at 500mb, Imholz said. Overuse problems are not widespread (only a few hundred accounts out of more than 12,000 actually use more than 500mb) but they can be serious. Many of the accounts are so far over the 500mb limit that some backups have been halted when the system failed to read all the data, Imholz said. Quota implementation is scheduled to take effect July 1. “Most people will never know we’ve implemented Homeroom quotas,” Imholz said. Others will get an e-mail warning that they have used up all their allocated free space. They will then have two choices: Throw away some older files to make way for new, or purchase more disk space at $200 per gigabyte per year. He stressed that any money earned this way would go back to CCIT for purchase of even more Homeroom space. When the portable storage space was introduced to the MUSC public five years ago, it was an immediate success. Homeroom is the name given to the array of large storage drives that provide secure backup space available to all faculty, students and staff at MUSC. Homeroom can be accessed from any kind of computer located almost anywhere. This makes it ideal for storing important files that you may create in one place and need to use in another. Use has been picking up lately as a number of people store special sound and video files which take up an enormous amount of space. For example, one megabyte of storage can contain any one of the following:
As the deadline nears, those who exceed the 500mb limit will get an e-mail notifying them of their choices. Once the quotas go into effect, any file written to the disk that would cause that account to go over limit will result in a “Disk Full” or a “Disk Error” message. Imholz said that some over-quota users might experience a false sense of security when a saved filename shows up on the Homeroom drive “because that file may not contain all of the information of the original.” One exception to the quota limit will be those who have a special directory on their Homeroom drive called “dept_html.” Nothing in that directory (which is a pointer to the MUSC World Wide Web) will count against a personal quota. Most people don’t have this directory because it is reserved for those who manage a department’s web pages. How can you tell if you are near or over quota? Check yourself out at <http://www.musc.edu/ccit/quota/> the quota Web site. Here you’ll find some useful information including the number of files on your homeroom space and the amount of drive they take up. In the near future, this site will also let you set a periodic message
that will generate e-mail reminding you when you near critical storage
capacity.
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