Quota's which are modified later on keeps resetting to the old value

Submitted by signet on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 09:43 Pro Licensee

On one of our VPS servers which is running 3.73.gpl GPL we have a strange problem. The customer who is using the servers created a Virtual server with a quota of 100MB. Later on, as the site progressed, he modified the quota to a new limit, of 200MB.

The strange thing is, is that after a while the quota is reset to the old original value of 100MB. The customer has to change it again to 200MB. This happens every now and then.

Is this default/know behavior?

Thanks.

Justin Signet B.V.

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 11:55

Which page is the customer changing quotas on? The correct place is the Edit Virtual Server page .. but if he goes to Webmin -> System -> Disk Quotas, the settings there may be over-written from Virtualmin's own database of quotas.

Also, what kind of VPS is this? Some types (like OpenVZ) do quotas in a rather different way ..

Submitted by signet on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 08:49 Pro Licensee

Hi Jamie,

Which page is the customer changing quotas on? The correct place is the Edit Virtual Server page .. but if he goes to Webmin -> System -> Disk Quotas, the settings there may be over-written from Virtualmin's own database of quotas.

The customer changes it from within the virtual server section, not from the Webmin system.

Also, what kind of VPS is this? Some types (like OpenVZ) do quotas in a rather different way ..

It's indeed OpenVZ, do you know if we have to change something to resolve this?

Thanks,

Justin.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 12:42

Last time I checked, regular Linux quotas didn't work under OpenVZ.

Are you hosting this OpenVZ container yourself, or did you purchase it from a VPS hosting company? If the latter, you may want to contact them about quota support ..

Submitted by signet on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 05:02 Pro Licensee

Hi,

We are hosting the OpenVZ platform in-house. Quotas seem to work, I can for example do a "quota " on the command line with the expected results. In this case the problem is that the quota value keeps being reset.

With regards,

Justin.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:14

So if you change the quota manually from the command line, does it get reset too?

Also, is there some event that causes the reset, like a reboot of the VPS?

Submitted by signet on Fri, 11/20/2009 - 11:09 Pro Licensee

Hi Jamie,

I've just received a call from the customer and the quota's were reset again without any apparent reason. In which file/database are the settings saved? It's very strange for me that the quota's are resetten again to it's original settings, how does the system knows this settings?

Thanks,

Justin.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Fri, 11/20/2009 - 13:36

They are normally stored in the aquota.user and aquota.group files under the filesystem root.

OpenVZ does things differently though, as you can have separate quotas inside the VPS filesystem, and I am not entirely sure how this is implemented.

Did something trigger this reset, like perhaps a reboot of the VPS?

Submitted by signet on Wed, 11/25/2009 - 10:50 Pro Licensee

Hi,

The server on which the VPS servers run crashed, after the restart the quota was reset again. But when I, as a test, reboot the VPS nothing happens, the quota's are still OK after the reboot.

I noticed that the aquota.user file is a binary file so I can't check the values in it. Is there any other way to do that?

Thanks,

Justin.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 11/25/2009 - 12:31

The only way to check the quotas in that file is with a command like quota -u username, which reads that file.

In the case of a crash, are the quotas reset to some very old state, or to the state when the last proper reboot was done?

Either way, this sounds like some kind of OpenVZ bug - if Virtualmin cannot depend on the Linux quota system to reliably store limits, there isn't much it can do.