Hard quotas become unlimited?

I just switched from soft quotas to hard quotas for one of our clients that is taking up too much space with their emails. They are about to overrun our server! When the quota email report came in this morning, I noticed that none of their users are on it. I went to their virtual server, and their individual quotas were listed as 'Unlimited'. This is not quite what I had in mind. HELP!

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

How did you switch from soft to hard quotas exactly?

I changed the setting in the server templates: Server Templates>(template name)>Administration user>Disk quotas type

If tht is not the place, is there a way to shut off a users email if they go over quota?

Any ideas on this? I am running out of server space.

What I would recommend doing is switch back to soft quotas.

Unfortunately, that setting only controls what type of quotas are set for new users, and are visible for existing users. If you were on soft quotas to start with, none of your users will have hard quotas, so changing that setting will not help.

Currently, the only supported way to switch to hard quotas is as follows :

  1. Change that setting back to soft quotas
  2. Verify that you can see quotas for mailboxes in Virtualmin
  3. Backup all virtual servers
  4. Change the setting to hard quotas
  5. Restore all virtual servers

Is that a possible solution for you?

It might be possible at some point in the near future, but not right at the moment. We are looking to offload the client that is taking up all of the server space to a cloud somewhere. We are pricing various options. That client's virtualmin scheduled backup has been failing to ftp, their virtual server is now 16G, all email. No other server is even close to this. Even still, the transfer of the other virtual servers (about 120) to backup takes over an hour.

Questions:

Do I have to delete the virtual servers prior to restoration?

All emails will be restored when the backup is restored?

There is no other way? I am a programmer. If I have to manually configure anything, its ok.

I just did my homework on quotas. repquota command is telling me that there is a 7 day grace on soft quotas. Each users quota is listed. Does this mean that a user that exceeds their quota is shut off after the grace period expires? That would fix everything for me. Give them warning, then email stops working till they log into squirrelmail and clean up their mailbox.

tpnsolutions's picture
Submitted by tpnsolutions on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 10:52

Hi,

If the issue is email related, why not shift the client's email over to Google Apps. Not only would you save disk space on your server, but you'd also offload spyware/virus scanning, and CPU/memory usage.

Google Apps basic is FREE, and gives each "mailbox" 7GB of space.

If you'd like to explore this option, I can assist you for a small fee. (small is the keyword)

Send me an email to: pknowles@tpnsolutions.com if you'd like to discuss this option.

-Peter

Yes, soft quotas will become 'hard' after the grace period expires.

Another option (if you don't have a lot of users) is to switch to hard quotas, then go to Webmin -> System -> Disk Quotas -> /home or / , and edit each user one by one and copy his soft quota to the hard quota.

Thanks Jamie, that is just the answer I needed! Sorry that i did not understand the way soft quotas work.

Cool .. I will close this bug then.

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.